A new Fanta-sponsored comedy series consisting entirely of edited-together six-second Vines appears to be achieving its goal of engaging teens. The first episode of "Fanta for the Funny," launched Aug. 15, pulled more than 270,000 views on CollegeHumor.com and YouTube in its first week, reports the brand. In addition, a promotional Vine for the series generated 437,000 loops. Fanta and creative agency 360i worked with young Vine users to co-create the series. Three teens who collectively have millions of followers on Vine (Jason Mendez, Alli Cattt and Mighty Duck) were recruited to create some of the content and help engage their peers. They're using their social channels as well as Fanta's to encourage teens to share the episodes and submit their own Vines (using the hashtag #FantaForTheFunny) for possible inclusion in future episodes. In the first three days of the campaign, fans submitted 50 Vines, according to the brand. The first two episodes in the series are between five and six minutes in length. The Vine segments offer comic vignettes and observations on popular teen topics like dating, sports and music. The branding is fairly subtle, appearing at the start and in between the segments, rather than in the segments themselves. New episodes will be released each Friday for six weeks, through Sept. 19. The campaign "unites teens around their shared desire for fame and their shared passion for humor, while allowing them to be themselves and to connect their way,” said Racquel Mason, AVP Fanta and Flavors, in a statement. The series is also being promoted with advertising on major digital and social networks. Starcom MediaVest Group handled the media buy. The seven-figure campaign is a major investment for the brand, which spent slightly over a half-million dollars on measured media last year, according to Kantar Media data cited by Advertising Age.
The Emmys are television’s biggest night, and Samsung’s television division is looking to attract a little of its own attention on some decidedly smaller screen. The brand is using Monday night’s event to relaunch its SamsungTV Vine channel with Emmy-themed six-second videos highlighting the top nominated shows. (An image of a light bulb turning on, then growing piles of money, a competing second light bulb turning on, money disappearing, the first bulb growing brighter, and the money reappearing represents HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” for instance.) “We’re the number one television brand, and this is a chance to follow through on our promise to deliver an immersive TV experience,” Peggy Ang, vice president of marketing communications for Samsung Electronics America, tells Marketing Daily. “We’re just going to have fun, and we’re going to connect [with fans] not just with words, but with pictures and video.” The company has used its SamsungTV Vine account only sporadically, Ang says. Using the Emmys as a chance to relaunch the channel gives Samsung a chance to make a concerted effort to develop content that works with its brief, snackable nature. “Vine [has] an ability to show videos that are meant to be more of a fun nature — entertainment, as opposed to documentary-style,” Ang says. The company is looking to turn the Emmys into a “360 experience” by rewarding fans rooting for shows via social media with special prizes. While some of the rewards will be digital, in New York and Los Angeles street teams will be paying surprise visits on fans with prizes related to the shows they’re rooting for (such as a shield or sword for "Game of Thrones" fans). Determining the winners (two of whom will win a curved ultra-high-definition televisions) will be based on fan enthusiasm during the broadcast, Ang says. “We’ll be responding to them as they respond to us, and we’re going to engage with them,” she says. Though the Emmys are a one-night-only, annual event, the company is hoping to turn the short entertainment videos and connection with active social media fans into an ongoing program. “What we’d like to see is to make this a day-in, day-out experience for us,” Ang says. “This is not a one-time, one-night event, but rather something throughout the year to surprise our fans.”
With sales at its flagship brand falling, the Gap is looking to broaden its international reach, and plans to spend an additional $25 million on a fall ad campaign that urges Gen Y to flash its fashion personality. Themed “Dress Normal,” the San Francisco-based retailer says the campaign is a brand rallying cry for individuality, kicking off early next month with such celebrities as Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth Moss, and Jena Malone. The company says more celebrities will be announced as the campaign continues, and that it will include TV, as well as print, outdoor, mobile, direct, social, in store and digital. Developed in partnership with Wieden+Kennedy New York, taglines encourage consumers to “dress like no one’s watching” and “let your actions speak louder than your clothes.” “Finding your own version of ‘dress normal’ is an art – my normal is different from your normal, and that’s the essence of the campaign,” says CMO Seth Farbman in its announcement. “This fall, Gap celebrates dressing for yourself and finding those perfect items — a pair of jeans, a t-shirt — that make you feel confident to be your most authentic self.” The print ads are running in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy and Japan, as well as select international franchise markets. Mid-September, the company also intends to introduce something called the Dress Normal Project, an “experiential element” that will bring “normal” to life. Separately, despite a 5% drop in comparable-store sales at its Gap units and flat results at Banana Republic, the company reported financial results that beat expectations, and it raised its forecast for the remainder of the year. Net sales climbed 3% to $3.98 billion. Comparable store results at Old Navy increased 4%, as that brand continues to gain share among value shoppers. And online sales rose 11% to $515 million. The company, which has been aggressively trying to boost its international revenues, also unveiled plans to open franchised stores in India. (It also intends to open five more stores in China, and is on track to finish fiscal 2014 with about 110 Gap stores in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. “Given the struggles of the Gap business and a less than compelling spring/summer assortment,” writes analyst Ike Boruchow, who follows the company for Sterne Agee, “management decided to put less marketing dollars behind the spring product, shifting the expenditures to the presumably improved fall assortment (the first line with the full design team in place). With a tough first half out of the way, we see a favorable setup for the next 12 to 18 months given ongoing strength at Old Navy and Banana, and a potential top-line catalyst of new products and marketing at Gap stores.”
There's nothing like an eccentric mascot to help consumers remember a packaged good or home appliance brand. Most consumers — depending on their generation — can rattle off a short list of beloved characters that have become irrevocably linked to products. That approach, however, has not been tried in the water filtration category until now. PUR Water Filtration has made a sanctimonious "water critic" named Arthur Tweedie (played by an actor) central to its first rebranding since the Kaz division of Helen of Troy Ltd. acquired it from Procter & Gamble in 2012. Tweedie's self-appointed role in the world is to teach lesser beings why water purification is the sine qua non of good health and proper water responsibility, and why PUR is the brand for the job, whether the vehicle is pitcher filtration or faucet mount. The character — who might actually benefit from several gallons of unfiltered water from eastern Oregon, which is loaded with lithium — has a propensity for sudden bouts of rage directed at competitive brands and morons who just can't get with the program. He appears in three TV spots, and a host of digital elements that call out competitive brands. In one spot, he is in a company break room, giving a lecture on the benefits of filtered water, PUR and the MAXION filtration technology employed by the brand's devices. His boss comes in and asks him to go back to work. The unfiltered fireworks go from there. The character also holds forth on a social channel @ArthurTweedie, and his Tumblr site ArthurTweedie.com, where one can find short, really odd GIFs, like one where he's watching archival footage of an atomic test on YouTube (a metaphor for his personality quirks?), and longer videos from which the TV spots are snipped. The effort is by Boston-based Arnold Worldwide, which Kaz tapped late last year to handle the PUR brand after the brand parted ways with TBWA\Chiat\Day. "We are trying to re-imagine what the brand can be," says Brian Carboni, marketing director at Southborough, Mass.-based Kaz Inc. He tells Marketing Daily that part of the challenge is to build awareness and consideration in a category that isn't exactly sexy. "We needed to be fun and different to break through. We also want consumers to think about the quality of their drinking water. And we want to establish ourselves as superior." Which points to the turf battle for share of the $1.5 billion category for mostly pitcher-based filtration led by Brita. PUR leads in faucet-installed filters. And, says Carboni, there's the bottled water competition, which has put a fence around home filter market growth. "Filtration has a very interesting relationship with bottled water," he says. "As bottle sales go up, filtration can be flat. Over the past year and a half there has been a bit of softening in the [filtration] category for a couple of reasons: one is decreases in competitive media, and increase in promotional levels of bottled water. But we think a campaign like this, with its eccentric character, will help a lot." He says PUR's market budget is in the neighborhood of $15 million, slightly up from last year. The rebranding effort includes new packaging and logo for the brand, and a spotlight on the MAXION branded name for the product's filtration technology. The company has also redesigned its website with a focus both on product and a "why filter" delineation of category benefits: incremental reduction in human-made geology -- i.e. plastic bottles; savings from not buying water in plastic; reduction of contaminants; and the salubrious influence of good hydration.
A paid social media campaign from Deschutes Brewery promoted its flagship beer, Black Butte Porter, by promoting its unflagging fan, Jimmy Barr. The campaign is the first work from advertising agency TDA_Boulder, Boulder, Colo. The Bend, Ore.-based beer company said Barr, of Luzerne, Penn., was “hired” to fill the newly created position of Deschutes’ official director of Unofficial Social Media. For one week, Aug. 19-26, Deschutes turned its Facebook page into the “Unofficial Jimmy Barr Fan Page.” It will also produce special “Limited Release” six-packs of Black Butte Porter, labeled “Unofficial,” and tagged “Our way of thanking our Unofficial Social Media Director.” (The beer will be the same.) While Barr’s position does not involve actual pay, neither does it involve actual work — other than to keep on, if he so chooses, with the Facebook “Unofficial Black Butte Porter Page” that he has been diligently keeping on with for the last five years. The Deschutes page has added about 8,000 followers in the past week, rising from about 60,000 to 68,000. Keyword-targeted Facebook advertising, via Kinetic Social network, promoted the takeover. Different page posts, both with Barr’s picture, will either announce his new title, or tag him as “a hell of a guy.” On LinkedIn, banner advertising invited that career site’s viewers to “Congratulate Jimmy Barr on his New Position,” and linked to Deschutes’ “Unofficial Jimmy Barr Fan Page.” The beer company also promoted the stunt on its Twitter feed. “The way we see it, the only thing better than a ‘like’ is an unofficial like,” says Deschutes Director of Marketing Jeff Billingsley. “That’s where Jimmy comes in. We’re glad to have him aboard.”
August is unusually cool in many parts of the country, but air conditioning is desperately needed in auto dealerships this month, as cars and trucks are moving out of lots at a blistering pace. May had been the best sales year to date, but marketing firm J.D. Power, with help from its LMC Automotive unit, predicts August new-vehicle retail and total sales will beat even May’s volume. The company sees retail volume reaching 1.3 million units and total light-vehicle sales, which includes fleet, topping out at 1.5 million units this month, a 3% increase versus the month last year, and 60,000 above last month. A little inside baseball: If J.D. Power is on the money, August will be the sixth consecutive month where the seasonally adjusted annualized rate of retail sales (or SAAR, an academic total-year number that assumes the whole year — variations intact — behaves like August) exceeds 13 million. The firm is predicting that August will have a 13.6 million SAAR. With Fleet that numbers goes up considerably, but fleet often runs inverse to consumer demand, as fleet is the commercial orphanage for unwanted cars and trucks. J.D. Power says a big part of the sales gains will come from the traditional auto blowout on Labor Day, when automakers make a special effort to jettison last year's models, and maybe sell a bunch of the 2015 cars and trucks just rolling onto dealer lots. John Humphrey, SVP of J.D. Power's global automotive practice, says the volume this month reflects — and is, hopefully, a bellwether — of continuing industry health, as consumers are clearly willing to part with their cash. He said, in a statement, that consumer spending on new vehicles will reach $39 billion this month, and that, if it does, August will have seen the highest-ever level of consumer spend for new cars and trucks on record; and it will be the second-highest month ever behind July 2005 — when auto sales, including fleet, were topping 16 million per year. And, indeed, LMC Automotive sees sales breaking the sweet sixteen million mark for the year. For the full-year forecast LMC is sticking with 13.5 million units for retail and 16.3 million units for total light-vehicle sales -- both 5% increases from 2013 levels, per the firm. An especially sanguinary indicator is that dealers aren't having to lure customers through doors by putting cash on vehicle hoods. "The record consumer spending is fueled by both high sales volumes and high transaction prices," he says. The firm reports that average new-vehicle retail transaction price in August is $29,300, a record high for the month, beating $28,898 last August. Jeff Schuster, SVP of forecasting at LMC Auto, argues that the auto market boom really is a bellwether for the economy at large. "As a very robust summer selling season winds down, optimism continues in the auto industry for the remainder of 2014, with expectations of economic growth beginning to catch up to the growth in autos. As we look at scenarios for 2015 light-vehicle sales, external factors, including global conflicts and capital flight from emerging markets, account for the majority of the risk to further and expected growth in the U.S." "Car Dealership" photo from Shutterstock.
Have you heard of the new family of publications called Emit? It’s a sign of the times, really -- a company that has discarded tired old publishing principles in order to compete, and thrive, in the chaotic digital marketplace. Emit has a news-analysis title, a sports title, a celebrity/personality title, an entertainment title, a travel title, a cooking title, several fashion/beauty titles, several business titles….you name it. Pick a category of human activity and they have a vertical to match. In many ways, it’s like the traditional magazine publishers of yore, with one distinct difference: Emit does not impose a separation between, in the mocking words of its CEO Joi Perp, “church and state, whatever that was.” Who can remember? Something to do with keeping editorial operations segregated from the salespeople. At Emit, such compartmentalization is a relic of an increasingly remote past, when b) nobody could actually measure the popularity of any given article or any given author to the audience, and more significantly a), when advertising rates generated so much money everybody could afford editorial purity. Ethics are so twentieth century. This is now. Newspapers and magazines are gasping for life; who can afford the luxury of standing on principle? As such, in deciding who gets to work at Emit, one of seven key performance indicators is the ability to create content “beneficial to advertiser relationship.” The business plan is evolving, but stay tuned for new value-added programs, such as sharing personal and behavioral data of subscribers and fondling the genitalia of advertisers 24/7 on demand. “Wait!” you say. “Bob, you big josher…you’re making that up! What you describe is outrageous!” Haha! You got me. I am joking. There is no such CEO as Joi Perp and no such magazine company as Emit! How could there be? There is only CEO Joe Ripp and the magazine company called Time -- where, yes, the big boss actually claimed “church and state” was a mystifying concept, and as Gawker revealed last week, one of the employment KPIs actually is the creation of content “beneficial to advertiser relationship.” God help us all. Perhaps you recall, back in November, when Ripp announced that Time Inc. editors would no longer report to a central Time editorial executive but rather to the publishers of their respective titles, and that the editors were “excited about it.” He might not have been lying. I was once kidnapped at gunpoint; it was pretty exciting, as near death experiences tend to be. Nonetheless, the announcement ignited an uproar, which elicited this assurance from a Time Inc. spokesperson: "Our editors will have full responsibility for their own content. Nothing there changes." Perhaps you also recall how in this space yours truly translated that assertion: “’Everything changes.’ Editors, by virtue of their new bosses, will be obliged to show new revenue, which is a path to perdition.” Well, as Gawker demonstrated with an employee-ranking spreadsheet leaked by the Newspaper Guild, the union representing Time Inc. journalists, perdition has already arrived. In deciding which SportsIllustrated.com writers to dismiss in the company’s latest wave of mass layoffs, the category “beneficial to advertiser relationship” weighted equally with such performance indicators as “quality of writing” and “impact of stories/newsworthiness.” This was a smoking gun if ever there was one, and you can tell a lot about an organization based on its reaction when confronted with damning evidence of bad behavior. Enter Time’s content chief, Norman Pearlstine, who told New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman that the accusation was “bullshit.” “In a dot-com world, if you’re judging people on audience traffic, one of the qualities of those things is, are you creating traffic for advertisers that you can monetize? That’s what this question was about. Can you monetize this traffic? That’s a legitimate question.” That is, indeed, a legitimate question -- and many news organizations are exploring ways to exploit technology to broaden reach and give audiences more of what they are seeking without sacrificing the editorial judgment -- or as they call it now, curation -- that makes the publication valued and distinctive to begin with. Margaret Sullivan’s public-editor column in The New York Times on Sunday discussed a new Times hire meant to accomplish that very thing. But Pearlstine’s dismissal of the Newspaper Guild and Gawker was baloney. On the very same spreadsheet was the very KPI he referred to: “Audience/traffic.” The indicator in dispute "Produces content that [sic] beneficial to advertiser relationship,” was a separate category altogether. If Pearlstine is right (and he isn’t) then SportsIllustrated.com employees are being measured on the audience/traffic metric twice. So who’s bullshitting now? It’s hard to know what to feel worse about: the moral abdication or the accompanying craven rationalizations and double talk. By the way, on that subject, if Joe Ripp is really so baffled about “church and state” (and he isn’t) I can clear it up right now. It was the wall built between the sales side and the editorial side to keep publications from whoring out their sacred editorial product to make money. It isn’t that mysterious, really It’s been in all the papers. Plus, it was invented by Time Inc.
A popular topic on Reddit involves confessing your dumbest impulse buy. The lists are priceless. People have bought self-flushing cat litter boxes, 50 pound bags of glitter, remote control shark balloons, half a pound of pharmaceutical grade caffeine, and a set of bagpipes (the buyer admitted to being drunk at the time). You might be wondering what this has to do with Facebook and Twitter. Recently, both took big steps towards ecommerce. Facebook announced that it was allowing businesses in some markets to sell products directly in users’ feeds. Twitter purchased a company whose technology may make it possible for users to buy with a tweet. Some have compared the moves to Amazon and Apple, but I think that’s a bad idea. Amazon and Apple don’t merely provide a way to buy. They also offer reviews and other tools to help customers make considered and informed choices. Facebook and Twitter shopping will probably be much more in the moment. Sure, some users may take a friend’s recommendation or have already made a conscious decision to purchase a product before an offer appears in their feed. In my opinion, marketers will use the new capabilities to try to trigger fast, unconsidered sales. Reddit offers one perspective on the danger: buyer’s remorse. Its bagpipe buyer confesses that “I tried to play them once or twice but I could only make the majestic sound of an elephant dying.” The self-flushing cat box, raves its owner, is great if you enjoy putting your hands in “cat poop soup” once a week. A recent article in Psychology Today explains that impulse buying involves a disruption of our normal decision-making process. We don’t do it because we’re making intelligent choices. We do it because we fall victim to things like shopping addictions, loss aversion, and self-delusion. As a result, I’ve found, we often wish we hadn’t made those purchases and may blame the brand offering them to us. Still, I do believe you can intelligently approach selling on Facebook and Twitter. The key is to use digital technology to ensure that the benefits of doing business on them outweigh any costs. Here’s how: 1. Benchmark your social strength. Today, you can find a variety of tools to measure social sentiment towards your brand. The good ones typically isolate two metrics: 1) how often your brand is mentioned on social media and 2) whether those mentions are positive or negative. While social sentiment is not brand strength, it gives you a quick snapshot of the effect your activities are having. 2. Start small. Try to get comfortable and familiar with the platforms first. If you can, run a test program in a few markets. See what works before going big. 3. Target. One size fits no one in this game. Twitter and Facebook will likely provide plenty of tools to get your offers in front of people who actually want to see them. You should take full advantage of them. 4. Optimize. It’s hard to predict in advance what layout and messaging will work best or be most welcome to customers. Be sure to prepare multiple versions of offers for different audiences. Then test and refine them to improve your performance. 5. Keep an eye social sentiment. Continually check your social sentiment against your benchmarks. If negative mentions of brand increase sharply, you might want to rethink the kinds of ads you’re running, the customers you’re targeting, or whether you should be in this game at all. Like all new things, we don’t know exactly how ecommerce on Facebook and Twitter will play out. As a result, we should make sure we strategize well, execute intelligently, and track the metrics that matter. Our customers will probably not like us if we sell them musical instruments they can’t play or more glitter than they can possibly use. That said, whoever bought the pharmaceutical grade caffeine might want to get in touch with me. Some mornings I could see a use for that.