What channel are you watching?

Watching NBC, CBS, Fox? What about the Old Spice channel on YouTube? Now that’s a new one, isn’t it? Hard to believe that, according to an article in Advertising Age, the Old Spice commercials featuring Isaiah Mustafa and his responses to viewers Tweets have garnered 57 million views—yes, your read that correctly, 57 million views. Not only were the initial commercials creative in their use of Mr. Mustafa and their special effects – shot in one take. (Look at one closely to see if you can see any cuts between scenes. You can’t.) What impresses me is the interactive quality between Mr. Mustafa’s video responses to Tweets from celebrities and everyday people (Are they fake. I don’t know, but I don’t care.). There’s pleasure to be had here, and pleasure is the key to engagement. All of this taking place outside of mainstream media. 

Gatorade takes social media very seriously

The marketing people at PepsiCo, Gatorade's parent company, are taking their social media very seriously by setting up a "mission control" center in the middle of their marketing department's headquarters. This control center allows the company to monitor its brand on social network sites on a 24/7 basis. There are a number of interesting screens reported on the Mashable/SocialMedia website. Marketers like Gatorade want to monitor consumer sentiment in real time in order to evaluate the nature and level of engagement; engagement being all the rage in advertising circles these days. Engagement, you might say, is the new metric (measurement) of advertising effectiveness.

Keeping up with The Jones

There's a new movie  that is relevant to recent discussions regarding new ways to market products. The Joneses is a story about a family that really isn't a family. Rather, they are pretending to be a family living in a "normal" neighborhood and acting, well, neighborly, but all the while they are stealth marketers. Turns out the faux family has been placed in the neighborhood in order to sell products. You can watch the trailer for the movie here. Stealth marketing, sometimes referred to as "undercover marketing" takes place when the audience is not aware they are the object of a promotion. For example, you could be walking down a city street and someone comes up to you and asks you to take their photo with a camera, all the while they are speaking to you about the virtues of the camera. It's a form of one-to-one marketing that speaks to an interesting form of consumer engagement.

Social Media is Not a Panacea

Just because engagement is the new metric in advertising circles, doesn’t mean all the numbers point upward. There is risk involved when companies and organizations embrace new media; social media are no panacea. Take two recent cases in which Nestles and Kmart were attacked for disparate reasons, but attacked nevertheless. In the case of Nestles, the issue revolved around the company’s use of palm oil in its products for which an attack was launched by the environmental group Greenpeace. With regard to Kmart, the issue revolved around an online coupon that consumers thought could be utilized at any Kmart store; turns out they couldn’t, turns out it could only be used at select stores. Perhaps you wouldn’t think something like this would make consumers angry, but it did. I’ve provide a link to an article on The Consumerist so you can read some of the vitriolic comments. What’s the take away? The good news is that social media provide consumers with a direct way to communicate with the company, and in turn a company or organization can evaluate how they are doing in the public’s eye. On the other hand, consumers and other groups can band together to launch an attack on the brand. For professional communicators, the issue is how to manage all of this. As social media a relatively new for many companies and organizations, it’s important to understand fully their implications in marketing communication programs, and remember that measurement is not always in the upward direction.

Toyota Engages NASCAR fans

I don’t know about you, but the several feet of snow in front of my house is really inhibiting my lifestyle. I’m spending even more time than usual with popular culture, including lots of unavoidable advertising. Which brings me to my viewing of the Daytona 500 NASCAR race on Sunday, which was a sheer act of desperation. I cannot think of anything more boring than watching automobile racing. Yes, I know it’s the fastest growing sport (is it a sport?) in the United States. But don’t count me among its fans. One of the ads I saw was for Toyota racing, which directed the viewer to their website. It’s a really interactive website, and provides a good example of participatory advertising. In particular, I was drawn to the “Design it. Enter it” link that enabled the participant to do all kinds of fun things to a race car. And when finished, you can submit it to a contest. I spent a good deal of time playing around with this pretty cool feature (you can now tell I’m really stir-crazy!). I bring this to your attention, because I spent a considerable amount of time with this brand, and that’s the goal of participatory advertising: to create deep engagement that is sustained over time. Engagement is the new metric (way to measure) advertising effectiveness. We all know that most 30-second commercials go in one ear and out the other, so if an advertiser can get you to participate with their brand in some form or fashion over a sustained period of time, the likely result is deep engagement. Different brands go about it different ways – Starbucks is the pre-eminent user of multiple engagement platforms. But this Toyota website is a good example of how the “new” advertising works. Check it out and let me know what you think – even if you aren’t a fan of Danica Patrick.