found in Pride Magazine (my friend brought it back after going up to s.f. last weekend to dj at the gay pride parade)
this needs no explanation. it’s just awesome.
consumer insight
we reserve the right to refuse service to marginal subcultures
even funnier on the heels of the post about the nature of subconscious cultural aesthetic values, is this bit from ikea perfectly exemplifying what i like to call a “lifestyle slur“:
“Brightens up your grad’s dorm. Unlike a creepy gothic roommate, who can be a bad influence.”
….. all it takes to ward off the influence of bad poetry and clove cravings is funky colored scandinavian pillows?
this is amazing! djarum isn’t gonna know what hit it.
really, ikea! what are you thinking? even the goth students need cute pre-fab dorm room furniture, and instead of trying to figure out how you can get in on that sort of demand (hint: modified decor color palette) you deliberately hang a “no blacks” sign in your ad?
now you’ve gone and done it, ikea. there’s apparently already a tempest brewing in the goth online teacup, with folks sending out emails to their community mailing lists and including the contact info for ikea’s customer relations and social responsibility contacts. (maybe this could be a useful political activism strategy? just tie policy into lifestyle as opposed to social justice and people will get all caring about your shit and everything?)
anyway, ikea, let this be a lesson to you:
you don’t have to agree to EVERY snarky idea some hipster jr. advertising associate pulls out of his butt.
“we don’t even hang out in the same places anymore!”
just yanked this bit of rad from jeremiah owyang:
my favorite part is where she goes, “you don’t know anything about me.”
and he says, “i know everything about you sweetheart!” and starts spouting off all sorts of demographic statistics. perfect case in point about the difference between knowing your demo (defined by the market), and understanding your user’s identity (defined by the user).
and speaking of identity…. i found it particularly curious that the creator of this video is european. if you know anything about the european stereotype of the “american male” (insensitive, egomaniacal, daft) it’s kind of hilarious to consider the role of the “advertiser” being based on that stereotype.
if the shoe fits…
ok, i admit it, i totally love reebok’s new ($30 million, multi-platform) 
campaign announcing their community site www.goruneasy.com. i’ve been seeing their billboards all over town, and even just watched an ad on their site, and it’s so fucking clever and cute and makes me laugh every time i see some new bit of their creative.
here’s one of my favorite images from the campaign:
best jab at nike ever!
from: thirdwayblog.com:
The Run Easy campaign is a breath of fresh air from Reebok in a category obsessed with an obsessive attitude towards athletics. Nike has been successful positioning its brand to serious athletes, thus attracting millions of other consumers who admire but do not imitate this level of dedication. Too often both Reebok and Adidas ad campaigns have looked like pale clones of the original Nike strategy. This new multimedia campaign from Reebok aims to position Reebok squarely with casual athletes. It is a risky but worthwhile endeavor.
way to draw the running-shoe consumer identity line, and fucking stake your claim, reebok!
interestingly, here’s nike’s community site: www.joga.com. a site for hardcore soccer enthusiasts, and with a definitvely non-english url… what is it? i’m guessing like…. portuguese for “game”? (it’s juego in spanish… anyone speak portuguese?)
could the community sites of two companies that sell essentially the SAME freakin’ thing be ANY more different?
good to keep that in mind, that the community strategy approach can be just as varied as any other aspect of a campaign, and depend just as much on the kind of user you’re aiming to engage.
yet another question to throw into to the cauldron where that “how to measure the effectiveness of social engagement” mess is stewing: well, did your strategy engage the right audience in the right way?
one shoe doesn’t fit all, remember?
How Your Ad Agency is Sabotaging Your Campaign
It’s your campaign, you know.
You. The Client.
Sure, you’re hiring an agency to direct it, but YOU are paying for it. It belongs to you. Or even more precisely, it belongs to your brand. The ad agency is like the au pair you hire to make sure your baby gets the best care. It also happens to be an au pair that hopes to win awards for its stellar child-rearing, so it’s your job to understand the difference between sheer showmanship and actual skillfulness. It’s the difference between a successful campaign and sabotage.
There are several ways a campaign could fail. There is the once-in-a-blue-moon freak promotional accident, there are the disappointing occasions when some people take things way too seriously, and then there are the much less overt sort of failures, the kind that don’t even let you take advantage of all publicity being good publicity….
Sometimes an ad fails because it’s simply irrelevant. Because it didn’t find the right audience, because it missed the mark on how to communicate its message, or because it didn’t really understand who it was talking to in the first place. A bad advertising strategy won’t make national headlines, but this subtle failure will discredit your brand’s reputation, and it will convince an audience that your message or brand isn’t for them.
You’re counting on your agency to get you exposure; you’re not expecting it’ll make your brand lame in the process!
So what can you do to avoid this silent sabotage?
Well, to start, here are a few things you should understand about what matters in the process of choosing an agency, assessing its work, and understanding the measurements of your campaign’s effectiveness.
1. The ‘Creative’ shouldn’t happen before the Research
Before there’s a contract, all the agency wants is to convince you that they will deliver the most creative, most original campaign. They may even go to astounding lengths to prove their unparalleled creativity, but how many of their unbillable hours go into research? Enough to be certain that the message they are developing is going to be relevant and effective? It may be a creative concept like no other, but does the agency know the campaign they’re pitching is going to actually speak to your audience in their own language? Will it approach them on their terms? It may resonate with the hipster designers coming up with the creative, but not all consumers are made the same….So do they understand who yours are? Does your ad agency know what drives their culture, and how they express their identities? Can their pitch impress you with non-speculative revelations about your brand’s audience that you may not have even considered before?
It should.
The greatest disservice an agency can do to your campaign is sell you on creative without doing their homework first, because they are then bound to deliver what you bought even if its efficacy is questionable, at best. Worse still, any data will need to be skewed to corroborate the agency’s efforts. By selling the creative ahead of the research they are not only doing a disservice to your audience, they are doing a disservice to your understanding of your own audience.
2. There’s gotta be some ‘Creative’ left over for the Media Plan
Half the joke is in the delivery. And it’s half the ad too. Relying on a generic media plan belies a lack of understanding about, or even indifference to your users’ identity, and exposure without a targeted strategy should only even be considered by a very particular kind of brand–unless you’re buying Super Bowl ads, it’s not your brand.
Does your agency understand how and where to access your target audience, and the various subtleties and patterns inherent in the ways your target audience interacts with different marketing channels? Developing relevant and original communications strategies within the current marketing landscape is not about whether you buy ad-space in Filter vs. Vapors, whether you should build a microsite, which keywords to buy, and it’s certainly not about trying to make some video go “viral.” A campaign is no longer limited to being simply printed, broadcast, or even forwarded, it should be embedded. From Red Bull partnering with sub-culture creatives to produce a platform for Ascension from the underground, to Scion planting its car as the coolest item one can “buy” on the popular Tween online community Whyville, an authentic, relevant strategy plays an integral part in defining the message’s form and function.
The niche-ing of all media, multiplied exponentially by the variety of interactive opportunities makes the process of disseminating the message a lot trickier, but the payoff is that it can also make the message itself a whole lot stickier. Knowing how your consumers’ identities shape their interactions with your marketing approaches can be leveraged towards navigating the most important emergent medium: Culture. (Were you expecting the Internet?)
3. The Great User-Generated Content Divide
The average cost of a 30-second TV ad, including production and airtime costs, can run $500,000 to $1 million. Consumer-generated campaigns can cost just a few thousand dollars. So which amount do you think your Agency’s hoping you’ll write a check for?
User-generated content means audience engagement, message relevancy (if it’s not you’ll hear about it right away), authentic endorsement, and even the enablement of culture and identity expression. You should be excited. This is all pretty awesome stuff! But if consumers are making the “ads” for free, then how does the agency validate its cost? There’s a bit of a conflict of interest going on, for sure. Conveniently for you, a cottage industry of startups has emerged to help companies create and manage user-generated content for consumer contests and community input.
Your agency’s validation should lie in precisely this kind of interaction creation and management service. If the campaign concept does not include a function as a framework for enabling user engagement, it is effectively turning your audience away at the door when they arrive.
4. Traffic is not a useful Success Metric
If your site or ad was an art exhibit it would matter how many people were coming by to take a look. Manipulating an audience towards your site for a traffic spike is not that complicated, and it’ll let your agency produce some acceptable statistics for progress reports, but if the audience isn’t getting involved then the traffic doesn’t mean all that much.
Engagement does. From click-thrus, to subscription rates, to form submissions, the measures of a campaign’s success are revealed through audience interaction patterns. Integrated analytics are even better. For example, integrating analytis from an email campaign with site statistics allows not only for a much better indication of a campaign’s success, but grants greater insight into user behavior, which, in turn, will help develop more relevant communication.
Success metrics should be established in advance, but need to remain flexible enough to accomodate change as the campaign evolves. One of the greatest advantages of maintaining this kind of malleability is that it will allow your campaign to “self-correct.” Your community will tell you when you’re missing the mark if empowered with the tools to do so. At the end of the day the more positive the customer experience, the better a return rate you’re going to see.
– – –
Employing a meaningful, integrated strategy that allows you to measure and capitalize on the interplay between all the various marketing channels at your disposal is like playing pinball with a highly developed understanding of physics. The way that the ball reacts and moves from one side to another is the same way a consumer traverses your promotional terrain from interaction to interaction. What you don’t want is for your agency to show up, pull the plunger, and bang mercilessly on the side of the machine hoping to thwart the laws of physics by sheer force.
Agencies know they need to change, they just can’t figure out how. Half the problem is they’re so stuck in doing things the way they always have that their approach to new options is still, unfortunately, through the same old processes (uploading a TV spot to You-Tube, anyone?) The other half of the problem is that somehow along the way they’ve become convinced the campaign is theirs, and this sense of entitlement is keeping them from being curious or diligent enough to develop the kind of relevant and original communications solutions that are called for not only by today’s media realities, but by your brand.