Archive for the ‘Automotive Marketing’ Category
Have you heard about the Mercedes-Benz USA Tweet Race? Four teams of two drivers were chosen from special Facebook and Twitter event pages, which added 75,000 new Mercedes-Benz fans and followers in a matter of weeks.
On Feb. 2, the four Tweet Race teams will leave New York, L.A., Chicago and Tampa in specially outfitted Mercedes-Benz vehicles, and head to Superbowl XLV in Dallas. They’ll be directed and fueled by people’s tweets along with help from team coaches who have large numbers of Twitter followers. Fellow tweeters are invited to join a team and help tweet to them with race clues and tips. V.I.P. trips for two to numerous MB sponsored events can be won by these tweet helpers, along with other prizes. Winning is more than just getting there first. It’s also the largest number of active Twitter helpers and a few other social media measurements. Oh, and the winning team? They each get a 2012 C-Class Coupe.
The team coaches aren’t just people with a large number of Twitter followers either, they’re celebrities from various industries. Musicians, athletes and TV stars. If their team wins, $25k goes to their favorite charity.
So, while the main media platforms (Twitter and Facebook) are free, let’s add up what this whole campaign will probably cost MB USA. Celebrity involvement, an easy $400k. Putting four MB’s into the race, at least $200k. Two winning C-Class coupes, $80k. Winning coaches charity of choice donation, $25k. Cost of coming up with the idea, developing and managing the entire campaign, probably $1 million. Paid online advertising banners to help promote the campaign, around $500k. Total cost of this FREE Media campaign that will probably involve 8 million active participants for 7 days, about $2.25 Million. Will it ultimately do better for Mercedes-Benz than their $6 million dollar Super Bowl ad planned for 4th quarter of this year’s game that has an anticipated 150 million viewers? Time will tell, but that’s not the point of this post.
The point is that marketers should start thinking differently about how they will be paying for online campaigns in this new world of free media. Historically, an ad campaign followed its own 80/20 rule. 80% of the campaign costs would go toward buying the media (TV, radio, print, outdoor, etc) and 20% would go toward developing and producing the creative. Although that 20% could be more or less, depending on the agency and the production value, the idea is that the majority of the expense would pay for the media.
In the new world of social media, that 80% is either substantially lower or gone completely. It’s obvious how advantageous this can be for smart marketers, but the challenge of creating a campaign using social media that draws interest and interaction takes a whole new level of brain power and creativity, a skill that a lot of agencies today don’t have, be they digital or traditional. Brain power and creativity that can succeed in taking a non-intrusive form of communication and make the right people want to view it, hear it and get involved with it is the greatest challenge in this new day. And that has a few Clio award-winning creatives asking for early retirement.
Although this post is not meant to be a self-promotion for Brandtailers, it is interesting to understand why we have more easily adapted and succeeded in this new world. Over our twenty plus years in business we’ve had more clients with small budgets than not. We’ve rarely had the luxury of letting the media weight do the job. For us, it’s always been the need to flex our creative idea muscles to help make something come alive and work without a lot of media support. It’s kind of like we’ve been training for the Olympics for a long time and it’s finally here.
But back to the purpose of this post: Let’s all help each other understand the new opportunities as well as the realities of what is truly needed in today’s marketing. Big media budgets may still be around for the recovering 10% of advertisers, but the other 90% is demanding success without major media dollars. Is it possible? We think so. We’ve been doing it for a long time. Our mantra has always been, “It’s the idea, stupid.” Feel free to use it.
If you don’t understand what Foursquare is, you’re just like 98% of all Americans. Feel better now? But you probably should know what it is and a bit about how it works, so you can understand its implications for the quickly emerging power of what we call geo-location and geo-targeting services.
Most people know what OnStar is. Or even Lo-Jack. They’re computer and satellite driven resources that know how to find your car in case of trouble. Take that concept and put it on your mobile phone. Then look at your phone as having the capability of being OnStar or Lo-Jack headquarters, where you can see where everyone in your network is. Real time.
But say you have a lot of friends. And you only want to know where those geographically closest to you are. Just use your phone to “check-in”, sharing where you are (i.e. Kung Pao China Buffet). The technology Foursquare offers lets your friends see that you’re there. You can also see which of your friends are there, or at another place close by. Like maybe within four square blocks of where you are. Get it?
Then get the restaurants, movie theaters and retail stores involved and allow them the opportunity to entice you in. They’ll offer free food, special coupons, and even ego-centric virtual power trips like making you the “Mayor of Kung Pao China Buffet” with extra little perks. All because you frequent that establishment more often (or just first). There’s more to it, but this is enough to give you what you should probably understand.
So, who cares you ask? For now, only about 2% of America. But think about the implications of this technology being at everyone’s fingertips. Very Big Brotherish, but also very convenient. Now, think about what will happen when Facebook takes it and runs with it, which they intend to do very, very soon.
Stand by. It’s only just begun.
Although it’s hard to say Southern California has a rainy season, what little rain we did have earlier this year included a couple of pretty good downpours. In the midst of one of them, I stopped by Kragen Auto Parts store to buy new windshield wiper inserts for my car. What I saw was an amazing example of customer service. As I pulled into their parking lot, I saw a half dozen or so Kragen employees helping customers replace their wiper blade inserts. Now, a set of wiper blade inserts usually costs under $10.00. It’s not a huge profit center for a store like Kragen. But the good will that was being made in that parking lot was priceless.
Good Will vs. Media Dollars. Hmmmm…. So, I thought to myself, how can a business like Kragen take this concept and make it a home run online brand marketing success?
What if they had some local customers following them on Twitter and, when it started raining, they sent out a message offering FREE wiper blade inserts to the first 100 visitors. Do you think they’d have a huge line at the door? Marketing history says they would.
But wait, how can a store give out 100 sets of wiper blade inserts and justify the expense? At $10 a set that could add up to $1,000 in product! Yup. It sure could. But how much did it cost in media expenditures to get 100 people in the door? How much would it cost if they tried doing this on TV, or some other form of traditional media? And how could the message be distributed in such a timely manner, and thanks to Twitter, shared so quickly with friends, coworkers, family and other miscellaneous Twitter followers who get the offer re-tweeted to them? How much good will could be created by helping customers out, free of charge, at a time when they needed something pertinent to their immediate safety?
What’s the biggest challenge with this type of new marketing concept? Changing marketers ways of thinking. Getting out of the old mindset that you spend money on the media, and the creative, not on good will. That’s old thinking. And it’s really, really expensive thinking. Why not take just a tiny piece of all that money to be saved from expensive traditional media buys and instead use it to be helpful. Yes, even use it to give something away. With today’s consumer, being helpful can pay off ten-fold. Seeing those Kragen guys standing out in the pouring rain smiling and helping customers was enough to earn my loyalty.
By the way, did I happen to mention that almost every customer in the parking lot that day was holding a Kragen bag with other things they had purchased?
There’s a relatively new retail automotive TV campaign making it’s viral way around the country. It’s a puppet badger acting as a sleezy car salesman. Granted, most of the spots are very funny. But why? Watch the clip below and then ask yourself why it makes you chuckle. Possibly because you’ve experienced it? Is that smart marketing?
I’ve never understood this strategy. According to sales reports, neither have most consumers. I think this is just one great example of incomplete thinking in the marketing process. Could a funny industry-degrading ad get attention? You bet. Could it win creative awards? Of course (that’s just a question of money). But does it really change the opinion of the consumer when the “alternative” solution is presented? RARELY.
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It’s only Tuesday and it’s already been an interesting week. Depending on what news you listen to or read, the economy might be in store for a “good-but-not-great-and-certainly-cash-not-credit” holiday shopping season. With Black Friday just around the corner, this TED talk by John Gerzema of Young and Rubicam seemed like a timely 16-minute video to show my staff today. So I thought I’d pass it along here. John has a great background in consumer behavior and advertising, along with being co-author of a terrific new book, The Brand Bubble.
Look at this picture. What does it say to you? To me, it says there’s a woman out there with enough confidence to laugh at herself. That’s humility, and I admire the heck out of her.
I’ve met many people lately who are unwilling to submit to their lack of social media knowledge. They have the “I don’t understand Twitter therefore it is a joke” mentality. How sad. They will be last in the unemployment line in a few years.
Oh, I’m no poster child for humility. I didn’t really get Twitter until about 9 months ago. I thought it was stupid. Now I’m busy playing catch-up. So I speak as an equally flawed human being, which is why I can attest to the fact that businesses must embrace the power of social media whether they really understand it or not.
My message of hope to you is that you are not alone – MOST PEOPLE DO NOT YET UNDERSTAND SOCIAL MEDIA. But you can no longer ignore its marketing power.
These days, with technology changing so quickly, most of us need to trust and rely on others who know more than we do about these new business tools. The sooner we find them, trust them, and let them help us, the sooner we’ll gladly have our picture taken in a Wonder Woman costume. I look forward to it.
