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This week’s nominee comes from a friend of Ad Mavericks with a keen eye for detail – and a strong “Buy Into the Circle” determination to support local businesses!

Have you seen the latest tv spot from Office Depot?:

Creative?  Yep.  Clever?  Check.  Well produced?  You got it!  Off the mark?  Absolutely!

Just for kicks, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of “Dan” the owner of the small barber shop in spot. Dan’s the little guy.  The guy who has spent his life working, paying taxes, furrowing away enough money that he could both make a comfortable-enough living to support his family and hopefully someday retire.  Then one day, a competitor comes in.  The “big box” guy with the slick marketing plan and cheaper prices.  The one that could ultimately drive Dan out of business.  Little versus big.  Local versus national.  David versus Goliath.

Fortunately, David (in this case Dan) is clever enough to develop a strategy to defeat the big box titans.  Unfortunately, he probably does it at the expense of one of his local business comrades who has worked at the local office supply store for years.  See, Dan opts to spend his money with ANOTHER BIG BOX RETAILER to battle the one that moved across the street to compete with him.

This is a brilliant spot if you’re a local independent like Tripletts or Storey-Kenworthy or Koch Brothers.  But when you’re the national, big-box retail brand suggesting that you battle the big guys by buying from the other big guys?  That dog just won’t hunt!

So congratulations Office Depot, your oxymoronic ad makes you our Worst of the Week!

Author: AdMavericks
www.lessingflynn.com
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Want to attract a young, energetic, vibrant crowd of people to fill your Mid-American, mid-sized city?  Check out the new “Possibility City” campaign for Louisville.  Here is just one of the cheeky new spots:

Besides the spots themselves (here and here), Louisville has done a great job of using social media.  A well-designed website, as well as a good following on their “Friend of Lou” Facebook page, and Twitter page.  It’s rare that you find a city with the guts to take the risks that this campaign takes.  And, as expected, the local newspapers and city council people are up in arms about the “racy” campaign.  But here’s a little secret:  they’re not looking to attract gray-haired newspaper editors and incumbent city council members.  They’re looking to attract young, creative people who will come to Louisville, eventually start new businesses, raise their families and pay taxes.  You can’t appeal to this audience with stale, unimaginative, creative-by-committee campaigns that everyone expects.

For any organization with a lot of stakeholders and opinions, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of building consensus, trying to appeal to everyone and offend nobody with your marketing.  But what you end up with a very safe campaign that nobody ever remembers.  Might as well flush your marketing budget down the toilet.

A hat tip to Louisville for having the guts to move forward on a well-done, creative campaign – and a thumbs down to the cowardly nay-sayers who would rather see a typical, unmemorable, politically-correct, traditional campaign that nobody would remember.  Now for the hard part Louisville, can you live up to the hype?

Author: Tom Flynn III
www.lessingflynn.com
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Here’s what I like about a new ad campaign from a company called Foster Farms.  A lot of food companies have tried to position themselves as a healthier alternative vs. their larger, industrialized competitors, using claims like ‘natural’ and ‘organic.’  Foster Farms actually takes the next step and provides the consumer with an actual benefit to them:  Foster Farms chickens aren’t “plumped” with saltwater that increases the chicken’s weight, so consumers aren’t paying as much as $1.50 per package for saltwater.  They’re just buying chicken.

The campaign is creative, and the message is spot on in an environment where consumers are taking a more critical look at how they are spending every dollar.  In fact, with more consumers cooking their own meals and fewer eating out at restaurants, the timing for this campaign is excellent as well.  Best of all, they’ve built social media into their campaign as well – including a Facebook page with more than 7,000 fans and a month-old Twitter account with 120 followers.  Considering that the people they are trying to reach are likely to be influencers, this is a smart move and gives them the a chance to help consumers build a stronger relationship with their brand.

With consumers taking a closer look at the foods they eat, as well as special interest groups trying to demonize mass food production practices (the movie Food Inc. is a good example), expect to see a lot more food and agriculture companies step up their own marketing efforts and look for ways to differentiate their products.

Author: Tom Flynn III

www.lessingflynn.com

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Ad Age recently reported that liquor marketer Brown-Forman has decided to shift all of its $10 million media marketing budget to the onlineworld. Last year, nearly 75% of that budget  was spent in print and cable tv, where they were so much competition that they were often being played in the same tv ad pods as their competition. It’s not every day you see such a drastic change in marketing strategy – especially from a company with a $10 million marketing budget.

Bold move?  Maybe.  The right move?  Definitely.  Southern Comfort is targeting the young legal drinking age crowd – 21-29 year olds.  This audience is now more influenced by the internet than they are print media or cable tv.  While their competitors continue to hammer away at each other using traditional media, Southern Comfort will separate themselves, better target their audience and engage them online in a way you can’t engage an audience using traditional media.  Even better, if they do it right, they’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of their marketing and make quick adjustments based on almost instantaneous feedback – something it can take weeks or months to do using traditional media.

Marketers who aren’t looking very closely at online marketing strategies are missing the boat.  The under-30 crowd all grew up online.  It isn’t a “new” media for them … it’s where they’ve been spending their time for the last decade.  Think about this … if you wait another 5 or 10 years before developing online marketing strategies, half of your market will have grown up in an online world.

Marketers who don’t start embracing the online world beyond just having a website will soon realize that they’ve missed a whole generation of potential customers who spend more time with things like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter than they do with newspapers, magazines and tv.  Just because you don’t know how some of these things work or you don’t use them doesn’t mean your potential (and often, most influential) customers don’t.

Author: Tom Flynn III

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Several suggestions for Worst of the Week rolled in this past week.  I had one suggestion about Pizza Hut’s brand confusion – with “The Hut” – which caused them to actually put out a news release stating that they were not changing their name.  Then, there was a suggestion of the latest ad from Burger King and the brilliant (not) promotional work their Singapore agency has done for them overseas (this should have been hands-down winner, but I hate to rag on – and give more attention to – BK and their inferiority complex again.  Also had a suggestion for an Iowa State University Facebook fan page with almost 9,000 members, but no status updates or wall posts (I’m not sure this is ISU’s official Facebook fan page – or if it is someone else that started this fan page).

However, this week’s award goes to Converse (yeah, the sneaker company).  

First let me say that Converse seems to be making a comeback with the teen market – so maybe what they are doing is working.  My teen “sources” seem to have put Converse back on their radars.  And Converse, with its Chuck Taylors, have always seemed to play a little to the counter-culture.  However, I’m not exactly sure how you make the connection from stylish athletic shoes to this. (www.kissingwithross.com)

If you can stomach exploring this site for any length of time, you’ll see other videos – all part of the same “campaign”?  I’m assuming this is some kind of crowdsourced type campaign where Converse asks people to be creative and submit their videos – but I have no idea why any company (besides maybe a body-modification company – note the guy’s ear) would want their brand associated with this.

There are plenty of good examples of crowdsourced campaigns – companies that have done it right.  Watching a guy kiss plate glass doesn’t qualify.  In fact, this campaign looks like it was developed with the stereotypical, award-winning “creative process” that happens at larger agencies demonstrated in this video:  

Congrats Converse, you are the Worst of the Week.

Author: Tom Flynn III

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Let me start by saying whoever is doing the marketing for Knoxville Hospitals and Clinics is doing a lot of things right.  They have a Facebook fan page with 60 fans as of this writing.  They have a Twitter account with 234 followers that is updated regularly.  They have a website that is much better than some other regional hospital websites (and even some in larger markets).  They are also pushing their ads out on YouTube – not enough companies are doing this!

Which brings us to the problem.  If you’re going to do tv advertising, you’ve got to spend the money to produce something good. Knoxville Hospital and Clinics’ tv spots are not.   I don’t know this for sure, but my guess is they are station produced.  That means a tv station essentially comes in and offers to produce tv spots for free, or for a very discounted rate – in return for a minimum advertising schedule with that station.  The station stands to make very little on the creative, so they put a spot together as quickly as they can.  Basically the formula is:  logo jingle at beginning, testimonial/spokesperson in middle with b-roll footage, logo jingle at end.  Done, you’ve got your spot!  In this case, I’d just say there’s an art to creating a song/jingle that matches the brand identity of the advertiser.  In these spots, there wasn’t a lot of time spent on that art.

There is too much advertising clutter out there these days screaming for people’s attention to not invest in the message side of your advertising.  In fact, while some of the media will say frequency is more important than message, we believe the exact opposite.  If you’re going to invest in any kind of advertising, make sure the message you’re putting out is top-notch – then figure out the most efficient way to deliver it.  If you’re from Knoxville Hospital and Clinics and would like some help, we’d love the opportunity to talk!

Author: Tom Flynn III

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Earlier this year, the Queensland, Australia Tourism Department launched one of the most unique, successful tourism campaigns ever.

They took out a series of online job site listings and black-and-white help wanted ads in a handful of newspapers around the world – advertising an opening for the “Best Job in the World.”  Interested prospects could apply by submitting a 60-second video.  The winner of the job would be paid $150,000 for six months and have a rent-free condo on the remote island – where they are expected to blog weekly on life there.

The campaign launched this winter with a $1.2 million budget.  The results?  35,000 entries from 201 countries (and you thought the job market was competitive here?).  450,000 votes.  601 hours of video content.  48 million website page views.  And, $100 million in unpaid media coverage.  And that’s just the start.

Congratulations to Ben Southall, winner of the position.  He’s set to start his new position July 1.  Congrats also to Queensland Tourism for taking a chance on an extremely out-of-the-box marketing campaign – and to their ad agency – CumminsNitro, who just happens to have a local office right there in Queensland!

Amazing how powerful a little bit of creative, outside-the-box thinking can be!

Author: Tom Flynn III

Ok, let me start this post out by saying we did not submit a proposal to provide the Iowa Department of Economic Development (IDED) with marketing and public relations services.  We didn’t feel we had the experience, size and, most importantly, political connections needed to earn that business.  We also didn’t have time to read through a 27-page RFP (request for proposal) document that forbade you from even meeting with the people you could potentially be working with for the next one-to-three years. So, no sour grapes in this post!

Typically, we’ve waited until Friday to post our “Worst of the Week”.  Not this week!  We couldn’t see anything trumping the Iowa Department of Economic Development’s decision late last week to hire a Public Relations firm headquartered in TEXAS to help recruit and develop more business within the state of IOWA.

Feel free to read that again.

The company chosen by the Iowa Department of Economic Development to represent the state in growing and recruiting new businesses and new employees for IOWA is Burson-Marsteller, an international PR firm with offices around the globe (but none in Iowa, according to their website).  The decision means at least several dozen Iowans, the same Iowans who pay taxes that the state uses to help recruit new employees and businesses to relocate to our state, will now be out jobs because the IDED helped move those jobs to another state!  Good job of economic development there, huh?

So, who is Burson-Marsteller and what can they do for the state of Iowa?  Well, if history proves anything, it should be an interesting ride.  Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, (one of the media outlets that Burson-Marsteller will be looking to spin about Iowa), describes Burson-Marsteller as “the go-to company when EVIL needs a PR firm”.  She lists a whole lineup of Burson-Marsteller’s past clients – Blackwater, silicon breast implants, Philip Morris, Aqua-Dots (the kids’ toy that turned into the date rape drug), Three-Mile Island, Saudi Arabian Government three days after 9/11 – … you get the picture.

But, this rant isn’t about Burson-Marsteller’s qualifications.  It’s about the Iowa Department of Economic Development thumbing its nose at Iowans.

Does IDED truly believed that there isn’t a marketing communications firm within the state that could do a great job of marketing Iowa to employees and businesses?

Does IDED truly believe an out-of-state PR firm can better pitch business editors and reporters as to why companies should move to Iowa than the people who have chosen to live and work here themselves?

Does IDED truly believe being a third-tier client for an international PR firm is better than getting the full attention of an Iowa company’s best talent?

Who made this call and what were they thinking?  Governor Culver, decisions like this are exactly why people have lost all faith in their government.

Congratulations IDED, you’re our Worst of the Week!

Author: Tom Flynn III

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A few weeks ago – before the Super Bowl – I wrote about the MillerCoors’ 1SecondAd.com campaign where they were buying one second tv ads on local tv stations carrying the Super Bowl. Well, initial results are in. The campaign worked.

Advertising Age reports that MillerCoors saw an 8.6% spike in sales during the week after the game – and more importantly 5% higher the week before the game. This is compared to relatively flat sales in the weeks around the campaign – and at the same time the year before.  Even more amazing is the fact that the actual 1-second spot didn’t even run in many major markets.

So, does this mean our attention-deficit society is in for a whole lot more one second ads on tv?  Don’t count on it.  But what it does demonstrate is the power of a well-planned, well-executed marketing campaign that uses out-of-the-box thinking and an integrated approach to public relations, traditional media and social media.

Cheers to you Miller!

Author: Tom Flynn III

Hyundai has been all over television with their latest ad campaign, Hyundai Assurance. The basic premise is that if you buy a car from them and you lose your job they will allow you to return it. That’s nice and all, and it seemed to cut through the clutter of most of the “its a tough economy look what we’re doing ads” but lets be real. If you lost your job, the last thing you would want to give up is your car. Pretty hard to interview when you are hoofing it in a suit everywhere you go. 

What would have really made a connection with the everyday consumer would have been to offer a delay on payments if you lost your job. Say, three months or so. Then, people who are unemployed might actually be able to find work again, or at least be able to show up for an interview.