Arby’s Bob Kraut, senior vice president of marketing and advertising, presented a strong case at Thursday’s Ana TV & Everything Video Forum for paying attention to how consumers react to advertising campaigns. Last year, after enduring a slump that was caused by a poor economy and confusing marketing and off-message menu choices, the company launched a new campaign devised by BBDO, proclaiming Arby’s as the “Good Mood Food” fast-food restaurant chain. Kraut described the initial effort as “We are the World meets Glee.” The campaign was designed to let consumers know that it was okay to enjoy the chain’s lineup of good-tasting comfort food because it was also relatively wholesome and fresh. But regardless of the nutritional value, the ads were a viral hit, said Kraut. “We noticed that people started re-mixing ‘Good Food Mood’ spots on YouTube,” said Kraut. “A lot of young people latched onto this,” he said, noting that many of the re-mixes featured kids and families adapting their own humorous lyrics into redone spots. The remixes prompted the company to develop a user-generated “casting call” contest for new 30-second spots. Entrants had to explain why Arby’s food put them in a good mood. The winner would receive a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to appear in a new Arby’s commercial. The promotion for the contest was relatively low-key, said Kraut, and limited to online exposure. But the response was overwhelming -- the company received 1,400 submissions, almost five times as many as the company expected. The submissions were posted on a new Web site and generated 1 million views a month. A new mobile Web site drew 16% of all online views. To draw attention to the effort, the company even filmed a “flash mob” spot in New York’s Times Square. A social media component featured a Facebook “Philly Zone Page” and a “Tweet Aquarium” for consumers to comment on a new fish sandwich. Bottom line: the entire cross-platform effort resulted in the highest sales gain the company had seen in a decade. Facebook fans grew over threefold to nearly 800,000, while Twitter followers climbed to over 30,000. And tagline awareness grew 60% in 10 months. And while 80% of the company’s budget is still reserved for TV Kraut said “we wanted to extend the message,” given the online response. While user-generated content is always a risk, Kraut said the company believed the YouTube re-mixes and the response to the contest revealed an untapped reservoir of consumers “who wanted to connect with us.” During the depths of the recession, said Kraut, the company was hit by a “perfect storm” of bad economy, muddled marketing and confusing shift in menu items that led to a double-digit sales plunge. But with a new integrated marketing campaign that engaged consumers, an improving economy and tweaks to the menu, the company appears to be back on track.
Brands win if they create personalized engagement. During the Super Bowl, people weren't just watching ads, they were creating content. According to Adobe, there were 12,223 tweets every second, per Chris Robinson, senior director of product management and advertising solutions at Adobe. Speaking at the 2012 Association of National Advertisers' TV & Everything Video Forum in New York on Thursday, he pointed out that viewers are becoming participants in programming that is driving overlap in media platforms online and off. But he added that marketers are, by and large, “delivering a disjointed experience to consumers." Samsung's consumer electronics division, for its part, is trying to bridge the gap by going beyond storytelling. Ralph Santana, SVP and CMO of Samsung North America, said social networking must be about story sharing. "Volkswagen set the bar in terms of how big and impactful sharing your story can be. But moving forward, we are moving into collaboratively creating stories with consumers." Santana said the goal is to give people an avenue to be more involved and interactive with brands and to give marketers ways to be more dynamic in terms of how they can tell their brands' stories. He said Samsung’s strategy is to create platforms that allow people to create their own stories, and by sharing, allowing them to also tell the brand story. "This enables consumers to put the brand at the center of their experience that can play out on multiple screens, tap into multiple behaviors and platforms in a way that is collaborative and real-time." Samsung is about to launch such a program around the London Olympics, noted Santana -- who said the brand ultimately wants to be a curator by enabling and eliciting a superior sports experience. That, he said, is the point behind the U.S. Olympic Genome Project, which the company will launch in coming weeks. The initial "How Olympic Are You?" phase encourages people to use Samsung's platform to find athletes with whom they share a degree of separation. "The way it starts is a call to action," he said. The effort uses Facebook to let people create a family tree that shows the Olympic athlete connection. The idea is to curate a community that people can create and share. "Ultimately, it enables you as a consumer to experience us as a brand. It allows us to enable a superior consumer fan-centric experience."
In January 2011, Spanfeller Media Group proudly launched a pretty, new food site, The Daily Meal. Over a year later, SMG is finishing what it started, and adding the platform’s missing ingredient -- video. “The complexities with doing [video] right along with the work involved in launching a new site prevented us from the optimal solution out of the gate,” admitted Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of SMG. “We have been working to fix this for some time and are now proud to see the results,” Spanfeller added. “It is important to have a great user interface and stable platform and a good program guide … All of which we think (hope) we have done.” Available across the site’s multiple channels, the new video network offers a mix of features, including step-by-step recipe guides; behind-the-scenes looks into various eateries; and discussions with professional chefs and culinary stars, such as Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons, and Mario Batali. Fully owned and operated by The Daily Meal, the video platform debuted this week with over 300 originally produced segments. New features should be added regularly, according to Spanfeller. “We are now doing around 15 original segments a week,” he said. “We want to ratchet that up to 100 or so over the next 12 months.” The Daily Meal Video Network will attempt to set itself apart with smart navigation features, an HD player, social media options and a site-wide program guide. Streaming pre-roll and mid-roll ads units with static companion ads will be available for promotional placements. The site is also working with advertisers to create custom content within the video network. “We have worked with a wide variety of marketing brands over the last 12 months,” said Spanfeller. “Right now we are more focused on getting the platform right. As we feel total confidence that all is working well and once we get VAST certification to serve video ad units -- should happen tomorrow or early next week -- we will be actively bringing these offerings to our clients.’ Last December, The Daily Meal unveiled its e-commerce site in partnership with Cooking.com, coined The Daily Meal Shop. Since its launch in January 2011, The Daily Meal has evolved into a robust site with over two million unique visitors per month, according to SMG.
The Association of National Advertisers announced an industry transition from the “current analog commercial slate into a digital one,” ending a 30-year-old industry practice for tracking commercials within content. The new format comes from the Advanced Media Workflow Association, and the ANA predicts it could save the industry $1 billion yearly with “fully digital file-based workflows.” ANA CEO Bob Liodice called it a "historic juncture" for video advertising. "We charge the industry with the imperative that we transition to standardized commercial delivery formats in all media, and implement Ad-ID throughout our ecosystem.” Agencies and marketers should be able to save hours of work, ANA said, since they “can be sure that the identity of a given ad is now properly embedded,” which should produce new possibilities with cross-platform measurement, as well as interactivity and addressability. The Ad-ID information on ads includes advertiser, product, commercial title and other data.
Gone are the days when kids rushed home from school to catch their favorite show only to fight over the remote control. Instead of sacrificing life and limb for control of the TV, people now view videos on multiple screens -- computers, smartphones, and tablets. In fact, according to Nielsen App Playbook, more than half of the audience multitasks on the Internet while watching TV. As a result, traditional TV advertisers are looking to make online video a more integrated part of their overall media plans, and for good reason. A recent Nielsen/IAB study found that people who saw a video ad across all four screens, (TV+PC+Phone+Tablet) correctly recalled the ad 74% of the time, an increase from 50% ad recall when they saw the video on TV only. So the question is: how should advertisers allocate their video budgets? To shed light on this topic, we recently sponsored a study utilizing Nielsen’s Shareshift analysis to estimate the impact of allocating some of a company’s TV ad budget to online video. The study revealed that assigning even a small portion of a TV advertising budget to digital video can have a big impact on campaign performance. Shifting $2 million in ad dollars from an $80 million TV advertising budget to digital video provided:
There's a reason most "funny" videos promoting professional-services firms don't push into the triple-digits in YouTube views, much less go viral: they're all the same. They mine the workplace setting for material, finding comic inspiration in community-fridge banditos and interns with borderline social disorders. They attempt to amuse while strenuously avoiding any topic that could offend a hypersensitive current or future client, which rules out everything except oatmeal-mild jokes at the company's own expense. Also, they're hard to find. In a cyberuniverse filled with clips of ninja sentinel cats and Van Halen tearing it the eff up at the Us Festival in 1983, who's going to seek out videos of ad guys indulging in a spot of state-sponsored whimsy? Job seekers and employees of the campaigning agency who, suck-up-ishly, hope the bosses are monitoring their web browsers, I guess. That's all. So let's give an appreciative though not inappropriately affectionate pat on the back to the PR pro who pitched a story on Skiver Advertising's campaign of this ilk ("a rising star on the Orange County advertising scene, Skiver Advertising in Newport Beach is putting its money where its mouth is, promoting the agency itself and supporting the 'uncomplicated' brand identity the agency has become known for since launching in 2001"), because she provided us with a teachable moment. The lesson is this: If you work for a professional-services firm, do not attempt to distinguish yourself with a bunch of half-assed videos. Do not exaggerate for comic effect. Do not rhapsodize about how your office 'tude is "relaxed." Do not place your lifestyle-accommodating perks, like octuple-ply toilet tissue or abundant acreage devoted to bicycle racks, on proud display. Just don't. If you feel the urge to self-exalt or self-deprecate, do so in the privacy of your own boudoir. It is not possible to make yourself stand out in a 58-second clip, especially when you're not all that distinct to begin with. An ad firm that prides itself on its "fun, casual atmosphere"? In this day and age? Whoa! If someone introduces a mirror ball or hula-hoop into the mix, stuff's gonna get freaky. This isn't to dump on Skiver. The bits are original, within the constraints of the offend-no-one mandate, and agency prexies Jeremy Skiver and Rob Pettis wield above-average deadpans. The office itself appears to have abundant natural lighting, which is nice. But I can't get past a single question: What precisely is Skiver attempting to accomplish here? More or less every small- to mid-size creative firm bills itself as an inviting hamlet for those who shudder at the thought of mountainous hierarchies or prefer to ply their craft while wearing jeans. That's the gist of the video campaign, in which Skiver sends up liberal dress codes, interoffice transport and agency holiday videos (to the strains of a hopefully-not-copyright-violating snippet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside"). Similarly, why would Skiver choose to tout its Cali-mellow vibe and what one might fairly describe as "wacky shenanigans" at the expense of its work? Judging by the clips on its YouTube channel for client Kangaroo Express, Skiver does irreverence and gravitas equally well. Granted, publicists can't pump out press releases around "ad firm makes ads that advertise" as easily as they can "agency promotes culture via social media video and would really, really like to talk to you about it," but that's not an excuse to downplay the primary reason such firms exist. Meanwhile, and this whine isn't targeted specifically at Skiver, I beg all the aspiring Marty DiBergis out there to give the mockumentary format a rest. There are ways to be entertaining - "funny," even - without asking semi-self-aware subjects to address the camera and then cutting to a scene that belies what they've just said. I'd love to see a company go in the other direction: depict its office as something out of an Orwellian fever dream, with bad cop/worse cop performance reviews and a no-tolerance policy when it comes to khaki. That could work. Anyone who doesn't get the joke can steer far clear; anyone who does will immediately know that he's found a kindred spirit. Anyway, I like Skiver Advertising, which strikes me as one of the most funerrifickist places to work in greater downtown Newport Beach. I just feel that the firm sells itself short by playing up its personality, is all. Be careful not to shift the spotlight too far away from where it oughta shine.