While there are numerous varieties of Cool Whip Whipped Topping (including sugar-free), the nearly 50-year-old brand -- launched in 1966 -- is just introducing its first non-topping extension: Cool Whip Frosting. Three flavors of the new frosting (chocolate, vanilla and cream cheese) began hitting store shelves in September, and the launch’s marketing campaign kicked into full gear this month. Cool Whip Frosting is among the latest in a string of new-category extensions from venerable brands at Kraft Foods (Velveeta Cheesy Skillets and Planters Peanut Butter, to name two). In this case, product development research revealed that consumers were dissatisfied with shelf-stable frosting products, Cool Whip Brand Manager Marjani Coffey tells Marketing Daily. “Consumers said that shelf-stable frostings were too sweet, too thick and too hard to apply without damaging the cakes or other baked goods in the process,” says Coffey. Cool Whip’s answer: a frozen (thaws in an hour, while your cake is baking) frosting that’s easier to spread and use for decorating and piping, and has “just the right level of sweetness,” she says. In other words, a convenient frosting that’s more like homemade. (Suggested retail: $2.99.) The new products are located in the frozen foods aisle, next to the brand’s whipped toppings, so part of the marketing mission is alerting consumers used to finding frosting in the baking aisle that a new option can be found in the frozen aisle. Hence, in-store promotions include shelf-talkers in both the baking and frozen aisles, reports Coffey. The launch campaign, from The Martin Agency, is themed “Reasons to Celebrate.” Print ads in magazines, including People, Food Network Magazine and Every Day With Rachael Ray, are a key element. Each version carries the headline: “So good, you’ll look for reasons to celebrate,” along with a photo of a cake or cupcakes bearing frosting messages such as: “Baby almost slept all night!,” “Found your other sock!,” “Didn’t hit reply all” and “Took it back without a receipt.” Digital ads are being run on KraftRecipes.com, and may be expanded to third-party sites, according to Coffey. A digital coupon, and FSIs in early November and early December, are also in the mix. In the social arena, the emphasis is on Cool Whip’s active Facebook page. The page currently has some 334,000 “likes” -- up 11% since the brand starting promoting the new frostings there, Coffey reports. Pinterest is also being employed, along with outreach to some 30 mom and food bloggers. (The brand’s Twitter presence is still small, at present.) As with other brand extension campaigns, this one is expected to have some halo benefits for the brand’s existing, familiar products.
Concert and big-event producer Live Nation Entertainment has rebuilt its LiveNation.com site, and Chevrolet has gotten on board as a major sponsor. The site is focused almost entirely on fan content culled from social channels, using geo-fencing to tie fan tweets, comments, photos and videos to concerts as they happen. The Chevy Sonic subcompact is the focus, and Gen Y music fans are the audience. Russell Wallach, president of Live Nation Network, tells Marketing Daily that Live Nation is culling and curating fan blasts from sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook and pinning this to the venues, events, and bands. "When they are at that show, fans have their smartphones out and are taking pictures and sharing. Our data says over 75% of attendees take photos or capture videos on their phones at events, and almost 60% actually post it online. What we have done is build a designation for live music fans to create a community fueled by social media." He says the deal allows brands to create their own programming on the site and activate on the ground at concerts. Chevrolet, for instance, will have a presence at the Dec. 13 Live Nation kickoff concert in LA, per Matt Scarlett, Chevrolet's national advertising & sales promotion manager. "We will cross-promote the event by doing things like having vehicles on display, including a 'flying Sonic' [a helium-filled replica] and we will demo some of the things you can now get through [telematics platform] MyLink." Scarlett tells Marketing Daily that the deal gives Chevy access to guaranteed site traffic, since the company acquired TicketMaster two years ago, making it a major ticket-buying hub. In addition to advertising, the automaker has on the site its own content such as pre-roll videos in which featured bands interact with the Sonic and its variants. "It's a 360-degree approach with Web site integration, concerts and videos," he says. A Live Nation statement says the platform also gives marketers location-based data on social and consumption habits and preferences of music fans via in-house data companies Big Champagne and Live Analytics. "Music has been consistent with Sonic launch," says Scarlett, adding that Chevy did a limited activation this year with Live Nation. One of the Sonic launch ads featured the band OK Go using a Sonic to “play” a thousand instruments arrayed along the car’s route. The company will have a presence at SXSW, and is looking at 2013 tentpole events like the MTV Movie Awards. Chevy has also done wild stunts with Sonic. A new Nielsen study would support that tactic: it shows that younger consumers respond to extreme sports and aspirational ads. Thus, Chevrolet snagged a last-minute deal giving it sole sponsorship of the Red Bull Stratus jump -- garnering in the process a huge audience for Chevy’s own skydiving ad, in which the car itself free-falls from a plane. Scarlett says since a lot of these deals happen fast, it’s about snap decisions and gut instinct. "We were approached with an opportunity to sponsor the Red Bull event two days before." Says Scarlett, "sometimes, you just have to jump."
AudienceScience shut down its ad network, laid off 33 employees and reassigned others to positions focused on the company's advertising platform business to better support brands. Jeff Pullen, AudienceScience CEO, told MediaPost that trying to run an ad network while working to build out a platform stifles innovation and creates conflicts in resources. After several years, the ad network business became less significant to AudienceScience's overall strategy. "We felt it was time to make a definitive statement on our growth opportunity," he said. "Being out of the ad network business allows us to squarely align ourselves with the goals of advertisers." Pullen said the complexities of the digital marketing supply chain through margins, fees, unknown margins and other costs made it difficult to support advertisers. The focus now points to brands. The company will not buy inventory from various locations, from publishers and exchanges, and resell the inventory to agencies on behalf of their clients on an IO basis. AudienceScience will work directly with advertisers, execute campaigns on behalf of those advertisers, and make inventory purchases, Pullen explains. The fee becomes a technology, rather than a services fee. It's a different model than an ad network, he said. "The decision to move away from an ad network is a logical and consistent evolution of the way the business has grown in the past couple of years," he said. "The advertisers need more efficient processes that give them insight into the way they spend money, especially if more money is to find its way online." The strategy also expands into integrating social data and targeting. Earlier this month, AudienceScience introduced social targeting through its Gateway platform. Advertisers can tap social targeting data and ad inventory to support campaigns. The social features allows advertisers to create custom segments from a variety of social sources, including their own assets, as well as AudienceScience's data and third-party data and content partners. The Gateway's first-party data technology creates custom audiences from their properties, such as Facebook "likes," posts to community pages and ratings and reviews. Brands can customize segments using AudienceScience's social data and segments. The strategy starts to combine inventory on major social media sites through real-time bidding. It also supports private exchange technology enabling real-time buys with specific publisher partners, and social channels within the premium publisher network.
While there are numerous varieties of Cool Whip Whipped Topping (including sugar-free), the nearly 50-year-old brand -- launched in 1966 -- is just introducing its first non-topping extension: Cool Whip Frosting. Three flavors of the new frosting (chocolate, vanilla and cream cheese) began hitting store shelves in September, and the launch’s marketing campaign kicked into full gear this month. Cool Whip Frosting is among the latest in a string of new-category extensions from venerable brands at Kraft Foods (Velveeta Cheesy Skillets and Planters Peanut Butter, to name two). In this case, product development research revealed that consumers were dissatisfied with shelf-stable frosting products, Cool Whip Brand Manager Marjani Coffey tells Marketing Daily. “Consumers said that shelf-stable frostings were too sweet, too thick and too hard to apply without damaging the cakes or other baked goods in the process,” says Coffey. Cool Whip’s answer: a frozen (thaws in an hour, while your cake is baking) frosting that’s easier to spread and use for decorating and piping, and has “just the right level of sweetness,” she says. In other words, a convenient frosting that’s more like homemade. (Suggested retail: $2.99.) The new products are located in the frozen foods aisle, next to the brand’s whipped toppings, so part of the marketing mission is alerting consumers used to finding frosting in the baking aisle that a new option can be found in the frozen aisle. Hence, in-store promotions include shelf-talkers in both the baking and frozen aisles, reports Coffey. The launch campaign, from The Martin Agency, is themed “Reasons to Celebrate.” Print ads in magazines, including People, Food Network Magazine and Every Day With Rachael Ray, are a key element. Each version carries the headline: “So good, you’ll look for reasons to celebrate,” along with a photo of a cake or cupcakes bearing frosting messages such as: “Baby almost slept all night!,” “Found your other sock!,” “Didn’t hit reply all” and “Took it back without a receipt.” Digital ads are being run on KraftRecipes.com, and may be expanded to third-party sites, according to Coffey. A digital coupon, and FSIs in early November and early December, are also in the mix. In the social arena, the emphasis is on Cool Whip’s active Facebook page. The page currently has some 334,000 “likes” -- up 11% since the brand starting promoting the new frostings there, Coffey reports. Pinterest is also being employed, along with outreach to some 30 mom and food bloggers. (The brand’s Twitter presence is still small, at present.) As with other brand extension campaigns, this one is expected to have some halo benefits for the brand’s existing, familiar products.
Concert and big-event producer Live Nation Entertainment has rebuilt its LiveNation.com site, and Chevrolet has gotten on board as a major sponsor. The site is focused almost entirely on fan content culled from social channels, using geo-fencing to tie fan tweets, comments, photos and videos to concerts as they happen. The Chevy Sonic subcompact is the focus, and Gen Y music fans are the audience. Russell Wallach, president of Live Nation Network, tells Marketing Daily that Live Nation is culling and curating fan blasts from sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook and pinning this to the venues, events, and bands. "When they are at that show, fans have their smartphones out and are taking pictures and sharing. Our data says over 75% of attendees take photos or capture videos on their phones at events, and almost 60% actually post it online. What we have done is build a designation for live music fans to create a community fueled by social media." He says the deal allows brands to create their own programming on the site and activate on the ground at concerts. Chevrolet, for instance, will have a presence at the Dec. 13 Live Nation kickoff concert in LA, per Matt Scarlett, Chevrolet's national advertising & sales promotion manager. "We will cross-promote the event by doing things like having vehicles on display, including a 'flying Sonic' [a helium-filled replica] and we will demo some of the things you can now get through [telematics platform] MyLink." Scarlett tells Marketing Daily that the deal gives Chevy access to guaranteed site traffic, since the company acquired TicketMaster two years ago, making it a major ticket-buying hub. In addition to advertising, the automaker has on the site its own content such as pre-roll videos in which featured bands interact with the Sonic and its variants. "It's a 360-degree approach with Web site integration, concerts and videos," he says. A Live Nation statement says the platform also gives marketers location-based data on social and consumption habits and preferences of music fans via in-house data companies Big Champagne and Live Analytics. "Music has been consistent with Sonic launch," says Scarlett, adding that Chevy did a limited activation this year with Live Nation. One of the Sonic launch ads featured the band OK Go using a Sonic to “play” a thousand instruments arrayed along the car’s route. The company will have a presence at SXSW, and is looking at 2013 tentpole events like the MTV Movie Awards. Chevy has also done wild stunts with Sonic. A new Nielsen study would support that tactic: it shows that younger consumers respond to extreme sports and aspirational ads. Thus, Chevrolet snagged a last-minute deal giving it sole sponsorship of the Red Bull Stratus jump -- garnering in the process a huge audience for Chevy’s own skydiving ad, in which the car itself free-falls from a plane. Scarlett says since a lot of these deals happen fast, it’s about snap decisions and gut instinct. "We were approached with an opportunity to sponsor the Red Bull event two days before." Says Scarlett, "sometimes, you just have to jump."
AudienceScience shut down its ad network, laid off 33 employees and reassigned others to positions focused on the company's advertising platform business to better support brands. Jeff Pullen, AudienceScience CEO, told MediaPost that trying to run an ad network while working to build out a platform stifles innovation and creates conflicts in resources. After several years, the ad network business became less significant to AudienceScience's overall strategy. "We felt it was time to make a definitive statement on our growth opportunity," he said. "Being out of the ad network business allows us to squarely align ourselves with the goals of advertisers." Pullen said the complexities of the digital marketing supply chain through margins, fees, unknown margins and other costs made it difficult to support advertisers. The focus now points to brands. The company will not buy inventory from various locations, from publishers and exchanges, and resell the inventory to agencies on behalf of their clients on an IO basis. AudienceScience will work directly with advertisers, execute campaigns on behalf of those advertisers, and make inventory purchases, Pullen explains. The fee becomes a technology, rather than a services fee. It's a different model than an ad network, he said. "The decision to move away from an ad network is a logical and consistent evolution of the way the business has grown in the past couple of years," he said. "The advertisers need more efficient processes that give them insight into the way they spend money, especially if more money is to find its way online." The strategy also expands into integrating social data and targeting. Earlier this month, AudienceScience introduced social targeting through its Gateway platform. Advertisers can tap social targeting data and ad inventory to support campaigns. The social features allows advertisers to create custom segments from a variety of social sources, including their own assets, as well as AudienceScience's data and third-party data and content partners. The Gateway's first-party data technology creates custom audiences from their properties, such as Facebook "likes," posts to community pages and ratings and reviews. Brands can customize segments using AudienceScience's social data and segments. The strategy starts to combine inventory on major social media sites through real-time bidding. It also supports private exchange technology enabling real-time buys with specific publisher partners, and social channels within the premium publisher network.
While we cherish the approaching holiday season as the time of year to spend quality time with friends and family, busy moms treasure special moments of family togetherness each and every day. Visualizing today’s moms, the marketing images of time-pressured, over-stressed and economically stretched women tend to come to mind. However, the moments which are most salient to these hard-working moms are those daily opportunities when they can meaningfully connect with their children. After a long day of commuting, working, cooking, cleaning, chores, etc., moms are exhausted and report sometimes lacking the physical and/or cognitive energy to come up with creative ways to help her engage and connect with her children. Frequently, today’s moms will use media and technology as a way to spend special time with her children. For example, our LMX Family revealed more than nine in ten moms watched television with their children in the past week. The data further demonstrated both the adults and children are engaged during that experience. Its convenience makes television an important tool for moms. It is ready, easy to use and provides an experience they can both enjoy. Television can also act as a springboard to broader conversations. Whether discussing how a singer copes with nerves prior to his performance on “The Voice” or if the tablet computer they saw on the commercial would make a good gift for the family, television provides a setting that helps foster connections. Not surprisingly, online provides another environment through which moms and kids come together. For this generation of communicators, digital media connotes connection. In fact, in the past week, more than 80% of moms have gone online with their children. From YouTube to Facebook, parents love being able to share the greater world with their children. As we know, families use social media to stay in touch with one another. However, not only are moms friends with their kids on social networks, moms are introducing their children to it by sharing their profile pages with their children who don’t yet have their own. Moms take on the role of guide as they teach their children about the wonders and dangers of the online world. Online experiences also afford moms a degree of content control which they appreciate. They are empowered to modify the privacy settings on social media sites their children may use. They prescreen and download desktop shortcuts for those sites their children are permitted to visit. Search functionality is crucial, as they seek specific pieces of information to help with homework, find a particular video they want to watch with her child or begin planning the next family vacation. It may be surprising to some to discover that moms are also playing video games with their children. About three-quarters of moms report having played video games with their kids in the last week. Remember, many Gen X and Gen Y women grew up video gaming and, with user-friendly systems like Wii and Xbox 360 with Kinect, the world of gaming has grown far beyond the stereotypical hard-core gamer. In fact, moms report being very engaged when playing video games with their children. Music, party and exercise/active games have really motivated moms and their kids to play and have fun together. And isn’t that connection what wonderful memories are truly made of?
For the past year, I’ve been involved with a new venture called Ministry of Awesome (MoA). This nonprofit exists to water the seeds of awesome in our local community: bringing people together and providing inspiration and support to turn awesome ideas into reality. Our Facebook strategy has been simple. We post links to things we think are awesome (in our local area and around the world), as well as relevant updates or notices from MoA. We try to post reasonably regularly, but only when we actually have something to share that we feel good about We haven’t invited a single one of our friends or colleagues to “Like” our page. If we did, they would, of course, but mixed among those who are genuinely interested in our work would be those who just want to be nice to us. The latter group would be unlikely to engage with us on an ongoing basis, and their lack of engagement would be a sign to Facebook that our stories aren’t very interesting. As a result, our Facebook numbers have grown slowly (we’re at 430 Likes as of now), but our engagement numbers remain high, and so does our viewership as a percentage of total Likes. Similarly, we only send out emails when there’s something specific we need to share; it’s not based on any kind of timeframe. As I get more and more emails I become less and less tolerant of those that only exist to keep the sending organization on the radar. Trust me: If you’re on my radar because you’re sending me irrelevant emails, it’s not a good thing. Most essential, though, is the fact that our organizational activities are also entirely opt-in. Take the MoA Epic Caffeine Adventure. Five of us parked in a café for a day. We set out 20-minute time slots and invited people to come talk to us about whatever they’re working on. We were fully booked: 19 meetings in a single day. We considered the Epic Caffeine Adventure a success. But the whole thing was an experiment. If nobody showed up, we would still consider it a success, because we would have learned that this type of service, in this incarnation, isn’t considered useful in our community. The only reason to do something like the Adventure is because people want it. If they don’t want it, the solution isn’t to market it better or more. It’s to revisit what we’re doing, and why. It’s to question whether we are being useful and serving a purpose, whether we are responding to an actual need or merely to our own need to push our offerings. A fully opt-in business model is scary. It means accepting that people might not like what you’re doing. It means accepting that you might have to let go of your idea, that your idea might not be what the world is after. It requires deep introspection, self-awareness, and empathy. But just imagine if every company operated on that basis. Imagine what kind of world we would live in. I don’t know about you, but I’d sure opt into it.
Man. I wish I had time to recover from the story about the baby that was named Hashtag just before the column was due. And the newborn is a girl, no less! To the extent that I’ve put thought into Little Baby Hashtag at all, I was positively sure this name-challenged infant would be a boy. I’m reeling. But life, and social media, must press on, so today, let’s ponder Facebook Gifts, an ecommerce upgrade from what I’m pretty sure was the only thing you used to be able to buy on Facebook: a virtual cow. To some, per The New York Times, the fact that you can actually buy real-world gifts on Facebook now, from companies including babyGap, Dean & DeLuca and Apple, is one reason the stock has been trading relatively high, closing at a little more than $27 on Thursday. If Facebook Gifts has really contributed to a stock rebound, though, you have to wonder if it has never before dawned on some eternally naïve Facebook investors that you might be able to use the platform to actually buy stuff. As you can probably tell, I’m not all that excited about this. And that’s because Facebook would have to go a long way to ever become an e-tailer of note, not as long as Amazon is one click away from your latest status update. For the people among my Facebook friends -- and it’s not many of you! – whom I would actually buy gifts for, I’d be much more likely to use Facebook as a reminder engine that I need to buy a gift than I would actually buy something there. Nothing says, “I didn’t put much thought into your present” like an iTunes Gift Card. Of course, Facebook, as is its habit, is rolling out Gifts with a slowness that seems to intentionally defy the rate of technological change, announcing roughly a dozen partners when it launched this e-commerce offering in mid-November. But in case you don’t think the company is serious about e-commerce this time -- it’s had previous fits and starts -- this time must be for real. Facebook even rented a warehouse! In South Dakota! But Facebook Gifts got me wondering again about the potential strength of marrying social media and e-commerce. Right now the union only seems like a flirtation. The problem with this social commerce initiative isn’t just that most of us don’t think of Facebook as a place to buy gifts, or that the offering is limited; it’s also that those with a huge e-commerce presence, like Amazon, barely scrape the surface of what social data could bring to them. For instance, if you join, Amazon’s Kids’ Birthday Club, you can save a Gift List and post it on Facebook or Twitter, but who really wants to share their kids’ wish lists with potentially hundreds of people? It just isn’t very refined use of social data. Yes, there is a tie-in between Facebook Connect and Amazon, which, like Facebook Connect elsewhere in the digital world, can give you insights into what your Facebook Friends like. But, assuming the Facebook Connect relationship with Amazon is like any other, no money changes hands between the two parties. The revenue upside lies squarely on Amazon’s side of the house. The real ecommerce power for Facebook would be to make its relationships with Facebook Connect retailers into moneymakers. No more of this kumbaya “we want the world to be open and connected” crap. If someone buys something on Amazon based on the fact that one of their Facebook Friends liked it, Facebook should get a cut of the revenue And there’s even more upside. My Facebook Friends would get better gifts, and no Facebook employee, or contractor, would ever have to spend a long, cold December in South Dakota. (Here’s the agenda for February’s Social Media Insider Summit. Come on down!)