Travelers In-Synch campaign joins Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Mike Sciosa’s decision to take out John Lackey in Inning 7 of tonight’s Angels-Yankees playoff game has to rank among the all time worst decisions. But close behind it is the new In-Synch tagline from sponsor Travelers Insurance. That’s right, not “in sync” but “in synch” even though if you do a Google search for “Travelers in synch” they’ll correct it to “did you mean Travelers in sync”?

I’ve done advertising for Travelers in the past and trust me, they are not adding piercings and tatts to the traditional insurance pitch. This is an ill-advised attempt to slap on something of interest to a younger audience that would logically have little interest in insurance.

The ads, including a cute one with a terrier that ran during the game (he frets for his lost bone which he should have insured with Travelers) are standard stuff but then the bizarre tag line appears. “Travelers. Insurance. In-Synch™.” That’s right, in addition to pandering to 25-34 they are kowtowing to the legal department which is not the way to get the attention of the young and the restless.

Travelers, welcome to the Badvertising Hall of Shame.

Why you should try video marketing on your web pages

My client Online Trading Academy is a heavy user of search engine marketing—classified ads on Google or Yahoo that take the reader to a landing page. Their standard landing page was a tabbed mini-site that delivers quick downloads of information and captures the visotor’s contact information for follow-up by the sales team—what you would call a best practice. Then, they experimented with a “long form” single page that had a narrative sort of like a traditional direct mail letter with frequent links to get to a registration page. This beat the tabbed version handily.

Online Trading Academy video landing page.
Online Trading Academy video landing page; click the arrow to play the video.

But now they’ve blown away their “long form” control with this new page that goes back to tabs but has a self-running video.

On its main website which is just completing a redesign, Online Trading Academy is including a video description for almost every course. We try not to recreate the written description but to complement it, for the benefit of avid fans who will both read and watch. But the real benefit is that the video provides an alternate entry point for a post-literate audience that is not entirely comfortable with the written word. And that’s why you should experiment with video marketing if you aren’t using it already.

Internet users love video—even videos without cats in them! Interestingly, one of the most popular posts on this blog remains this one which I wrote last winter at the Consumer Electronics Show. Old news—but it has a video! And not even a hosted one but just a link to the file on YouTube. But now my ISP (Dreamhost, see “green hosting” bug in the sidebar) gives me the ability to play Flash and streaming video direct from this blog, which you bet I will be doing in the future.

And what about video in emails? I have clients who are champing at the bit to do this and have urged them to hold off because of the bandwidth required plus the likelihood of triggering filters (both spam filters and filters at the corporate gateway). Besides, it’s not really necessary. All you need is a still with a “play” arrow superimposed, linked to the actual video on a web page.

How social media floats the Oracle juggernaut

One of my first freelance copywriting clients after I moved to San Francisco was a very smart guy who had been direct response ad manager at Oracle. He based his strategy at his new company on what he had learned and done there, so I learned as well.

Screenshot of Oracle OpenWorld Live feed during the show.
Screenshot of Oracle OpenWorld Live feed during the show.

In a day when most tech marketing was fairly dweeby and feature-centric, Oracle took the advantage by brute force. Every day in the lower right corner of the local edition of the WSJ, there was an ad with a bar chart showing how much faster Oracle was than Sybase, then their major competitor because then Oracle was mainly a database company. And I myself considered applying for an ad manager position that was advertised in Adweek. Most classifieds described the job and the qualifications; Oracle simply ran a huge headline that said PREDATOR and follow-on text to indicate that’s how they wanted you to treat the competition.

During and just after the dotcom era, Oracle discovered an even more effective strategy to beat the competition: buy them. First there was Peoplesoft, then BEA, then Siebel (founded by an ex-Oracle marketing guy), now Sun. Today Oracle is a conglomerate and Sybase, its original competitor, has shrunk to 3% market share in its single market.

I was thinking about this history as I walked through Oracle OpenWorld, actually the first time I have attended in spite of my long Oracle history. It’s the only event I know of the many conventions held each year at Moscone that closes a major street so the party tent can be erected there. The result is gridlock throughout downtown San Francisco—classic smash-face marketing because everybody who is stuck in traffic is thinking about Oracle.

The typical OOW attendee is a database administrator (DBA) in a large organization. A key purpose of the conference is to make this typically mild-mannered individual feel like the most important person in the world by identifying with the Oracle juggernaut. I’m writing this post in an absolutely packed ballroom with thumping music and flashing visuals where the faithful are waiting, not for Roger Daltry or Aerosmith (they’ll be at the Customer Appreciation Event tonight) but for CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote.

With such a loyal fan base, using social media for marketing is an obvious choice and the Oracle folks are doing it well. The best example is OpenWorld Live, a website where you can watch a live feed (often with a couple of guys interviewing passers by about how happy they are to be at OOW) and simultaneously keep up with the tweets rolling by with #OOW09 as the hashtag. At the bottom of the page are buttons to take you to the Oracle conversations on Facebook and LinkedIn and even some code in case you want to embed the video on your own site. All Oracle, all the time, even when your laptop is propped up on your lap in the hotel room.

Commercially, Oracle is pushing a concept called Social CRM. I attended a briefing where Tony Lye, Oracle VP for CRM, talked about the concept of a “Listening Post” which will be incorporated in future releases. His prototype can gather and monitor conversations about Oracle anywhere in cyberspace (Lye though he was the first to do this, which isn’t true) and feed them into a sales and marketing interface such as Salesforce.com where they can be parsed by sales territory or other factor and the sales team can hunt down opportunities or put out fires. You’ll need a big database to do this effectively, and Oracle has one to sell you.

Oracle trade show gets suitcased

Fans of my suitcasing thread will be interested to know that I encountered a live example in the wild at the giant Oracle Open World show…. and even (unintentionally) participated in the hijinks.

I was collecting info for a post on Oracle’s use of social media when a gentleman handed me a flyer advertising a “social media meetup” which sounded like a great opportunity to get together with other social media gurus and talk about how Oracle does it. Little did I know he had a prison uniform under the poncho (it was raining hard) and was involved in an elaborate guerrilla marketing scheme for somebody called ActiveVOS.

Oracle, as mentioned in my other post (coming shortly), has a long reach and an iron grip when it comes to exacting loyalty from its users. ActiveVOS offers a BPM (Business Process Management) solution that can be used with Oracle… or, without! So rather than buying booth space they decided to position a bunch of people in prison uniforms outside the convention area, to make the point that you need to break free of Oracle’s chains by using products like theirs. It got good press, picked up by PC World and IDG.

SO, I asked marketing VP Alex Neihaus at the meetup, this really isn’t about social media at all, is it? Sure it is, he said. He used Twitter and Facebook to get the word out, and indeed I saw tweets advertising the meetup embedded in the stream of happy chirps from Oracle loyalists on the Open World Live site. Alex says this is “authentic” and it is a reality of social media marketing that, for better or for worse, once you buy into it you don’t have a lot of control over who says what.

The link to the ActiveVOS website was oddly missing from the invite to the meetup (maybe they were worried that Larry Ellison would mount a DoS attack?) so here it is.

how to make money with Twitter

I’m wondering why I and so many others were so ga-ga about Twitter at SXSW earlier this year. Maybe it was the new TweetDeck app that allowed us to chirp back and forth about the session that was happening in front of us in the same room. But anyway, I was expecting Twitter to change my life and it hasn’t.

If you want to make money with Twitter, what marketers are realizing is that it’s a great platform for communicating with your EXISTING customers—the same discovery we all made about email. Example: the Korean taco truck telling followers where it will show up next. A company letting its best customers in on a “secret” sale. And an organization like Zappos which has discovered Twitter is an effective vehicle for internal communications. I guess this isn’t really making money per se… rather, you’re saving money or expanding your base with an efficient means of targeted communication.

Best way to make Twitter relevant in your own life: go through your tweets and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who tweets frequently with info that is not fantastically interesting. If you are disappointed with what you read in Twitter, do this immediately then replace the unfollowed by going to http://wefollow.com/ and following a few media sources or people that seem interesting. Repeat on a regular basis, unfollowing those who aren’t interesting after all. Yes, this is work, which is the antithesis of what Twitter is supposed to be.

Twitter founder Biz Stone calls it “curating” your tweets, as if we all had a roomful of Hundertwassers instead of inane tweets about needing to go to the gym. Okay…

Hidden money in your advertising (the direct marketing topic)

Last weekend I visited friend and fellow copywriter Dan Shaw and we were bemoaning the tight creative budgets in this economy. The issue is this: if a client can get an email or a web page written for $100 or $200, why in the world would they hire someone like us at several times that amount?

The answer is that you’re not just paying to get a project completed and checked off in your to-do list. You’re paying for results. And if a page costs 5 times as much to create yet generates 10 times as many leads, clicks, sales or whatever you’re looking for… then it nets out 50% less expensive. That’s hidden money in your advertising which is there for the taking as soon as you look beyond the basics of “how cheap can I get it”.

Writers and designers who do direct marketing well are compensated on results. If we interview with a prospective client we expect they will ask us to show us our “controls”—these are campaigns (the term usually refers to direct mail) that beat out competitive tests or previous controls so thoroughly they become the standard that is used again and again.

The more controls you have under your belt, the better you are likely to be compensated. Because your client is paying for results, they know that a writer who has the skills, instincts and experience to win repeatedly is likely to do better for them on the bottom line.

For example, Dan does some marketing to prospective college students who are choosing a school. He was telling me during our visit about a usability study he attended where he watched students as they interacted with web pages to see what elements appealed to them and were easiest to use. This translates into better results when he does his own pages for clients.  And his clients are quite happy to pay for that knowledge and insight.

With budgets tight, it’s very tempting for a marketing manager to just hire the cheapest provider and it’s tempting for a marketing director to review their direct reports on the basis of “how much money did you save me this quarter?” But it’s a cheap fix and in the end it may cost you more if your true goal is to get more customers, leads, donors, sales dollars etc. which of course it is.

Next time you bid out a project, take the extra step to hire somebody who’s good enough to charge more—and can prove it. If your management asks why you did not choose the cheapest possible solution, tell them you’re paying for results. And that’s how to find hidden money in your advertising.

What makes Apple marketing insane (ly great)

Consistent and thorough (you might also say obsessive) are words that describe any Apple marketing effort. I got an example when I decided to treat myself today to the just-released Snow Leopard upgrade, speed and various new features for an affordable $29. Was near an Apple store (Knox Street in Dallas) so stopped in.

They had a little VIP line with a delicate white chain set up in the middle of the store. (Which, as Apple stores usually are, was packed. What are all those people doing in there? How many visits does it take to buy a computer or iPhone?) You move quickly through the line and an employee hands you your DVD case, shakes your hand, says “congratulations.” Another employee handles the receipt and puts a little payment confirmation sticker on the case that says “Lucky You”. And the door employee (who introduced herself by name as I entered) repeats the congratulations on the way out.

Compulsive and obsessive are signs of mental imbalance, right? Is that what Steve Jobs means by “insanely great?” But it’s also very effective marketing because it makes customers feel smart and special.

Why it pays to market during a recession

When times get hard, marketing is one of the first things to get cut. Consumers have less money, so why market to them at the same pace? And with a smaller budget, are those people in the marketing department even necessary?

As a matter of self-preservation, marketers like to counter that a recession is actually a great time to sell more aggressively. When others are cutting back, you can gain market share at relatively low cost by doing the opposite. And we’ve always had a few juicy stats to prove the point, with an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal providing fresh fodder.

In Q1 ’09, New York Life grew its market share to 5.4% from 3.9% a year earlier. It did this by increasing its advertising budget by 24%, and telling its agents they had a “moral obligation” to present the company’s strength to clients. Ads changed from a sentimental teddy bear theme to a serious message about financial stability. By second quarter, the firm had leapfrogged from ninth to second place in revenues from premiums and annuity deposits as many clients put extra money into their life insurance policies.

Bed Bath & Beyond was equally aggressive, increasing advertising expenditures to 3.7% of revenue in 2008 from 3% in 2006. Much of that money was invested in targeting the 100 key stores of a major rival, Linens ‘n Things. Linens coupons and discounts were matched dollar-for dollar. The payoff: Linens ‘n Things went out of business. And with its increased marketing share, sales at Bed Bath & Beyond were up 2.8% for its quarter ended May 30, compared to an drop of 13% in the home furnishings sector overall.

If you’re a marketer, sink your teeth into those stats next time you present to the money people—and be sure to tell them you need some strong creative help to get the right message to your audience. WSJ reminds us that Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup (comfort food) and Revlon nail polish (affordable luxury) are products of the depression that are still successful today, born of aggressive marketing and a well-told story at a time when others were cutting back.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

The lead story in the Specialty Foods newsletter today really caught my eye. “Some 52% of consumers are monitoring the amount of sodium in their diets and 26% read labels for sodium.” This seems simply incredible on the face of it, especially in the context of my new home in upstate New York where 77.8% of the populace pays no attention whatsoever to what goes into their gullet.

Seeking understanding, I follow the link to its source — Mintel, “a leading global supplier of consumer, product and media intelligence.” Here I find out that:

  • 22% [of consumers] restrict the amount of salt that they add to food, but don’t watch the much greater amount of sodium that is in foods and beverages
  • 18% say that “food and beverages low in sodium are one of the three most important components of a healthy diet”
  • 26% read labels for sodium, and may make some decisions based on this info, but they are not following a regimen to control sodium in their diet
  • 34% do not pay attention to sodium

Except for the last stat (which seems low), none of these numbers seems at all credible to me on a seat-of-the-pants basis. Do they to you? Perhaps this is some research from a survey that is skewed to make a particular marketing point? So let’s look at the original source material, the verbatim comments from the survey. Oops, they aren’t available. Instead Mintel offers a link to a webinar where we can learn about “Sodium: The Next Trans Fat?”

High school debaters learn that with a little digging, they can find a “statistic” to support any point of view. Perhaps in the Mintel survey, and I’m stipulating that there was one, they asked people “do you ever think about the amount of sodium in your diet?” and 52% said yes. That would still be a high number, but I’d accept it. Then maybe some creative marcom copywriter changed it to “monitor” which recasts the same stat as alarming or fascinating news.

One of my earliest bosses promised he was going to teach me to “lie with statistics”. I didn’t last very long at that position and don’t know what happened to that boss. Hmm…

What we can learn from janitors.

Have you ever watched a janitor replacing fluorescent light bulbs? They change all of them, whether or not they are burned out. The opportunity cost of climbing up on that ladder is high enough that it outweighs the time remaining in the still-working bulbs (which is probably short since they were replaced en masse last time).

I need new rawhide laces on my Googie lamp shade.
I need new rawhide laces on my Googie lamp shade.

I thought about this when I rediscovered my Googie side lamps from the 50s which had been stuck in the attic during a remodel. Soon after I acquired these, the rawhide laces in the shades were starting to fray so I went to Mendel’s in the Haight and got replacement laces. Foolishly, I replaced only the laces that had broken. Now the rest of the laces are shot and I have no idea where the rawhide went, so I’ll have to buy more and this time I’ll be smart enough to replace everything.

A parallel lesson comes from Keith Campbell, who was my client and president of the Federated Group of home entertainment stores back in the day. Keith never went to college but he knew that when he found something wrong in a store–say, a sloppy warehouse of A/V equipment that makes it difficult to find what a customer wants–it is typical of a larger problem. A manager wouldn’t be careless about that and careful about everything else. The whole system needs to be taken apart and examined.

Think about things as a system, not a series of one-off events. You may discover some problems… or, opportunities… in your own marketing.