Pizza chain Papa John's is launching a social-media campaign at its Facebook site, called "Papa's Specialty Pizza Challenge," asking its fans to suggest a new pizza. And in an unusual twist, the company is offering the winner of the promotion a portion of the profits from sales of the top pie, which will join the menu list at restaurants, and $1,000 to help market the pie during the month when the finalists compete for sales volume. When people go to Facebook.com/PapaJohns, in addition to entering the toppings list they have devised, they also have to write a brief rumination of 250 words or less what makes their pizza unusual, special, or generally audacious for a chance to win. The company is judging the pies on appeal, taste, creativity of the name and the quality of the back story on how the contestant dreamed up the pie. While the company says all entries will be featured in a gallery on Papa John's Facebook page, the company's president, "Papa" John Schnatter, and associates will choose 10 semifinalists, whose recipes will be cooked and tasted-tested by Schnatter and other judges at Papa John's Louisville, Ky., headquarters. The top three recipes will be showcased on the chain's menu through August. The highest-selling pizza wins, and the winner gets free Papa John's pizza for life and an appearance in a "Papa's in the House" TV commercial. A Papa John's spokesperson explains that the contest winner gets 1% of sales, up to $10,000 for the 12 month period that his or her pizza is offered following the contest. The winner also gets free pizza for life (based on 50 years of pizza at $480 per year). "The winning pie will actually become a part of Papa John's specialty menu, but the start date is yet to be determined," says the spokesperson. As for the $1,000 that the finalists get to promote their pizzas during August, "They can use the cash to create viral videos in support of their pizza, buy advertising, rent a billboard and so on, or just keep the money and hope the popularity of their pizza catches on in other ways," says the spokesperson. This is the first time in company history that Papa John's has asked consumers to name and create a pizza and share the story of their pizza. Last May, the company launched the "Papa's In the House" campaign, whose central conceit is that Schnatter might actually show up to homes as the delivery person. The ads have him driving a replica of the Chevy Camaro he purportedly sold to fund his initial foray into pizza. The ads, via Z Group, use real customers and are shot around Louisville. The international chain is the third-largest pizza company globally, after Domino's and Pizza Hut.
Pizza chain Papa John's is launching a social-media campaign at its Facebook site, called "Papa's Specialty Pizza Challenge," asking its fans to suggest a new pizza. And in an unusual twist, the company is offering the winner of the promotion a portion of the profits from sales of the top pie, which will join the menu list at restaurants, and $1,000 to help market the pie during the month when the finalists compete for sales volume. When people go to Facebook.com/PapaJohns, in addition to entering the toppings list they have devised, they also have to write a brief rumination of 250 words or less what makes their pizza unusual, special, or generally audacious for a chance to win. The company is judging the pies on appeal, taste, creativity of the name and the quality of the back story on how the contestant dreamed up the pie. While the company says all entries will be featured in a gallery on Papa John's Facebook page, the company's president, "Papa" John Schnatter, and associates will choose 10 semifinalists, whose recipes will be cooked and tasted-tested by Schnatter and other judges at Papa John's Louisville, Ky., headquarters. The top three recipes will be showcased on the chain's menu through August. The highest-selling pizza wins, and the winner gets free Papa John's pizza for life and an appearance in a "Papa's in the House" TV commercial. A Papa John's spokesperson explains that the contest winner gets 1% of sales, up to $10,000 for the 12 month period that his or her pizza is offered following the contest. The winner also gets free pizza for life (based on 50 years of pizza at $480 per year). "The winning pie will actually become a part of Papa John's specialty menu, but the start date is yet to be determined," says the spokesperson. As for the $1,000 that the finalists get to promote their pizzas during August, "They can use the cash to create viral videos in support of their pizza, buy advertising, rent a billboard and so on, or just keep the money and hope the popularity of their pizza catches on in other ways," says the spokesperson. This is the first time in company history that Papa John's has asked consumers to name and create a pizza and share the story of their pizza. Last May, the company launched the "Papa's In the House" campaign, whose central conceit is that Schnatter might actually show up to homes as the delivery person. The ads have him driving a replica of the Chevy Camaro he purportedly sold to fund his initial foray into pizza. The ads, via Z Group, use real customers and are shot around Louisville. The international chain is the third-largest pizza company globally, after Domino's and Pizza Hut.
Search engine marketing has become a bigger piece of Kodak's overall marketing plan, but a new share feature built into a camera takes the campaign into product designs. Leslie Dance, Kodak's vice president of brand marketing and communications, explains what she calls a "360 approach" to rebranding and supporting the more than 100-year-old company. That approach led Kodak to bid on non-branded and branded terms, looking toward "owning search terms" before the product reaches the market to make consumers aware that they are on the way. Each time a campaign gets set in motion, the agency supporting search marketing must come to the table with a fresh approach to reach consumers through search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. As part of Kodak's rebranding effort, the company launched a YouTube brand channel and a new campaign called the "Calculator Challenge." With this interactive campaign, consumers can determine how much money they might save on printer ink if they buy Kodak's products and stop overpaying for ink cartridges. Once consumers determine the potential amount saved, they are encouraged to upload a brief video describing what they would do with their savings. Kodak's 24-hour ad takeover on YouTube for ink cartridges garnered 48 million impressions, 200,000 clicks and high click-through rate of .55%, Dance says. Between March 20, through April 7, Kodak estimates 22,000 video views on the Kodak brand channel YouTube page, and about 3,000 calculator starts. Peter Gardiner, partner, chief media officer at Deutsch, which began working with Kodak more than a year ago, designed the YouTube part of the campaign. The notion of the campaign was to get consumers "fired up about being ripped off by the big ink companies." Describing a dashboard that provides feedback on how each part of the campaign works, Dance says companies don't need to spend millions of dollars to target specific consumers. Kodak created an online performance index its marketers can view through the dashboard. That means looking at more than traditional click-through rates by following consumers through the marketing funnel to develop benchmarks, as well as rating each ad in the campaign to determine where to spend campaign dollars. Kodak's personal imaging unit became the latest to follow this benchmark for ad campaigns. A television spot that began running this week highlights what happens when consumers press the "share" button on its 530 camera. The campaign message carries the theme "The real Kodak moment happens when you share." The campaign supports print, a microsite, Facebook and YouTube. Dance says the company has been dabbling in mobile, too. Location-based services and coupons are on the horizon. A few tests have been done with mobile coupons. Mobile efforts could make more sense if the company ties the campaigns to specific stores, such as Staples or Best Buy. Partners + Napier provided support for the latest TV spots, Facebook, YouTube and microsite work. The campaign called "Real Kodak Moments" announced Tuesday aims to emphasize the connection between family and friends. Aside from Deutsch, and Partners + Napier, other agencies supporting a variety of campaigns for Kodak include Omnicom Group's Ketchum, WPP's Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and Rabinovici & Associates.
Congrats, Facebook. You've made every media pundit sound like the female leads in "Clueless," forcing us to use the word "like" every fourth word: "So, like, now you can like every webpage, and then like it on Facebook, and then like Facebook pages, and you can like what your friends like, and it's, like, awesome." A lot of questions have been coming up about Facebook's updates from last week, and this is a great forum to answer them. I want to thank some Twitter friends (who were, ironically, more responsive than my Facebook friends) for contributing some questions that are answered to varying degrees below: Kevin Planovsky, Ellis Reid, Joey Redmond, and Gavin Thomas. Let's open up the mailbag. Can you sum up the debate on Facebook's openness? Sure. Pundits are taking sides on how "open" Facebook is at its influence spreads across the web. The debate's fairly silly, as it only exists because Facebook named its new protocol the Open Graph. If Facebook called it the Facebook Graph or the We Control the Web and You Don't Graph, the whole debate would be moot, and we'd still be debating about whether Chatroulette is better for porn or marketing. Open Graph allows any website to have the same functionality of a Facebook page, minus the tabs that no one uses. For instance, Pandora will show you the artists and customized radio stations your Facebook friends are listening to. There are a lot of winners here -- Pandora, its users, and Facebook -- but this remains a closed environment. Facebook's in control. There are genuine attempts to make the web more open, such as with OpenLike. The idea is that no one service will own the sharing and rating data; it will be available to all who take part. It's too soon to tell how well these open protocols will work and if they'll get any traction. Should I get Facebook's Insights for Your Domain on my site? Probably. At facebook.com/insights, there's a green box on the upper right called "Insights for Your Domain." Facebook will give you a line of code to add to your site, and you can connect this to any of the Facebook pages you own. This will specifically show you information on Facebook users who visit your site and share content back on Facebook. Data available includes: daily likes, daily shares, feedback per share, reshare rate, most shared links, gender, age, country, city, and language. Most marketers and site owners probably aren't tracking this information, and you can compare Facebook's data to what you already track. You can also get a better sense of how the audience of your Facebook page compares with the Facebook users who visit your site. How much should I care about privacy? A lot. Let's go back to the Pandora example. My Facebook friends may be okay with me knowing their musical interests; after all, most friends list their interests in their profile. But my friend who says she likes Phish and the Black Eyed Peas on Facebook may not want to broadcast that she's listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora. Actually, I found a friend listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora, and she's not even showing me her musical preferences on Facebook, nor is she a declared fan (or connection) of any musical artist. I'd imagine she'd prefer to remain anonymous here, and I'll leave her name out of it because she didn't opt in. Facebook and Pandora are not giving her the same courtesy. If you're implementing Open Graph or any of Facebook's social plugins, keep the consumer perspective in mind. Some of the consumers who care the most may never realize what you're revealing, and they may never figure out how to adjust their privacy settings on Facebook. They're the ones whose perspectives you'll have to keep in mind. Is search dead? Namely, is Google dead? No. First of all, marketers will always want to reach consumers explicitly seeking their products and services. As long as marketers are appropriately measuring its value and budgeting accordingly, search engine marketing will continue to thrive. Much bigger advertising and marketing budgets are spent trying to reach consumers who aren't explicitly saying what they want. Google has a stake here too, thanks in large part to acquisitions such as DoubleClick, YouTube, and Pyra Labs (Blogger). Consumers tend to be targeted demographically, contextually, or behaviorally, but there's an emerging field targeting consumers based on their social graphs, or whom they're connected to. We're just starting to learn the value of social graph ad targeting. There are a number of companies pushing this emerging field forward, including 33 Across, Lotame, Media 6 Degrees, and Socialmedia.com. If Facebook turns the Open Graph into an ad model, it will instantly be the biggest player in the space, but the web and the social web are far bigger than Facebook. I'm worried about how much information I'm sharing. How do I change my privacy settings on Facebook? I'll spare reiterating all the details, since GigaOm and Mashable both did this so well. The short version is that while logged in to Facebook, click Account in the upper right corner and then go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck the box. You'll want to visit those other links for more information. What if I have more questions, or answers? Share them in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.
It was another big week in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. The annual Ad:Tech conference was in full force, playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they're innovating across online, search and mobile advertising. At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers' Conference, called F8. Like Twitter's conference the week before, the gathering was for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across a growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who now visit the site each month, not to mention all the brands anxious to reach them. Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. Its new Open Graph effort, which provides Web site publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites, will be a game-changer. In addition, Facebook has essentially set every users' default to "globally social" -- which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook, but wherever it is extending its tentacles across the Web. Web sites that add the new Open Graph features to their site can also add a tracking token -- like the Google Analytics tracker -- that will provide publishers data from Facebook's new Insights analytics package. For instance, Levi's new Friend Store leverages Open Graph. If you see a "Like" button next to, say, a cool pair of jeans on the Levi's site, and you click on that button, your endorsement will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. And Levi's will be able to see the degree to which its site content went viral across your particular social graph. In the meantime, Facebook will track everything you're liking, posting, etc. for its own advertising platform, enabling it to target ads to its users based on what they've declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates. Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it's hoping that because users will see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they'll be more receptive to those messages. At Ad:Tech, all the buzz was about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Everyone in the business, it seems, is particularly interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook. And Facebook knows it. It's also clear all the ex-Googlers in leadership positions over at Facebook learned a lot from their experience baking AdSense into the Web's plumbing -- you could call Open Graph a cousin to AdSense. Moreover, as they continue to refine Facebook's equivalent of AdWords, today's search marketers will be able to add "social marketer" to their job descriptions more effectively. In addition, all those SEOs out there have a whole new dimension to focus on as they work to optimize Web sites not only for search engines, but also for Facebook. Keyword lists will take on whole new dimensions as semantics, target markets, personal interests, and rising and falling memes become a critical part of deploying ads on Facebook. While there are many unknowns to contemplate around all this new stuff, the key concern will be the degree to which people become animated about privacy issues. Facebook is being careful to advise its users about what their actions and activities will mean, and providing avenues for opting out of a variety of social settings. Over time, however, people will slip. A casual "like" may trigger a cascade of opting-in, and because most of us won't pay attention when that happens, it's likely the vast majority of Facebook users will have essentially bought in to the new scheme. Still, there could be a backlash. The rise of Facebook, and to lesser degrees Twitter, has been good for a whole variety of reasons. The most important of these is the wave of innovation that has been unleashed, which may represent the first credible threat to Google since its ascendancy began more than a decade ago. The best news is, the entire marketing profession and the brands we serve are the major beneficiaries. These remain exciting times.