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I kid, Richard, you can do no wrong - which is why you are such a great brand spokesman.

The fantabulous Richard Simmons was live and in person at Chicago's Union Station this morning, promoting OceanSpray's new Cranergy drink (which ain't half bad, I must say).

My wife Christy stumbled into this grand marketing event en route to work and couldn't believe her eyes. Nothing like a random appearance by Richard Simmons to really liven up your morning.

"I noticed a huge crowd of people taking photos, so I figured someone famous must be there," Christy wrote to me of her encounter. "I wandered over there and saw crazy hair first and immediately knew it was Richard Simmons. He was extremely happy and overly nice to everyone."

Christy said Simmons, wearing his patented red-and-white stripped shorts and a red tank top with a rhinestone heart on the front, was singing and screaming and doing some exercises alongside some OceanSpray reps. And then, he stopped everything and noticed my wife.

"I was standing kind of behind him (but still about 8 feet away) as he took photos with people," Christy wrote. "Suddenly he turned around, walked toward me with arms outstretched and said 'Oh! I haven't said hello to you yet!' He gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I said a surprised "hello!" as we embraced, then walked away shocked."

"It was bizarre."

Yeah, and memorable, and hilarious, and definitely buzz worthy. Christy of course isn't the only Chicago commuter who will be sharing a Richard Simmons Chicago encounter story, likely for weeks and months to come.

But of course, with a personality like Richard Simmons, there's a pretty good chance your brand can get overshadowed (even though he's a natural fit to represent an energy drink). That must be why OceanSpray was giving out not just single bottles of Cranergy, but entire 24 bottle cases, right outside of Union Station, one of which I brought up to our office kitchen.

Work it, OceanSpray!

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If you didn't note Earth Hour last year, chances are that you will tomorrow. Tomorrow evening, as the clock ticks toward 8:30 P.M. local time, people, businesses and monuments around the world will dim their non-essential lights for an hour to auspiciously observe the growing global awareness of climate change.

This is the third year of Earth Hour, which is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). In 2007, it took place only in Sydney, Australia; in 2008, 400 cities around the world participated. Tomorrow, more than 2800 municipalities in 84 countries are expected to dim their lights, including Cairo, Egypt, which will lower the lights shining on the Great Pyramids at Giza, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. McDonald's is going to lower the lights on its golden arches in 500 locations. The lights will dim (but not go out) on Broadway. Here in Chicago, the skyscraper that houses the AMA offices will shut off its recognizeable--and power-draining--top light, as well.

Power companies, such Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, are lending financial support to the initiatives. At first thought, it didn't make much sense to me. But on second thought, what better support does the Earth Day initiative have than that of companies that will lose a few bucks if people start cutting back? Chicago's participation falls under ComEd's parent company's Exelon 2020 effort toward energy efficiency and environmental programs. The Chicago effort for Earth Hour is also supported by the WWF, the City of Chicago and Leo Burnett (which explains how all those Earth Hour posters blanketing downtown got prime ad placement!).

All of these efforts ride the rising tide of sustainability, eco-awareness and the movement toward grassroots consumer action. Earth Hour isn't only in the purview of big brands though. It is accessible to all businesses, large and small, to promote sensitivity to environmental issues. Is your business participating?

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Marketing News began the year with our “Get Your Head in the Game” series, basically telling marketers to accept that times are bad and move on to find creative ways to market today. It’s fun to see companies doing just that.

Hyundai set the bar for recession marketing pluckiness when it offered to take back cars sold to people who lose their jobs. Now others are coming out with similar offers. Two have caught my eye in recent days.

Domino’s Pizza has launched it’s "Domino's Big Taste Bailout" promotion that includes a contest in which people nominate others in need of a bailout. Two winners will get a year’s worth of Domino’s offerings free. Domino’s CEO plans to deliver the prizes himself. The contest is tied to a price promotion offering of three pizzas for $5 each. A lot of food purveyors are offering lower-priced options these days, but Domino’s is adding a nice bit of flare and dramatics with its contest offer.

Clothing retailer JoS. A. Bank Clothiers, Inc. is promoting what it’s named The Risk Free Suit, offering to rebate the purchase price of a suit bought during a current sale to anyone who loses a job between mid-April and July this year. Granted this is a bit derivative of the Hyundai offer, but it’s innovative for Banks which normally has a pretty staid approach to marketing, so kudos to the Maryland-based Banks.

Let us know what you’re doing to stand out from the crowd in this recession. We’d particularly like to hear about B-to-B offerings that break the mold these days.

On another score, I clipped something early this month about the Prevent Cancer Foundation and pharma company Sanofi-Aventis putting a giant inflatable colon in Times Square to increase colorectal cancer awareness. I suppose this succeeded as a PR stunt given the attention it received, but I found it a bit too painful to look at. Anyone over 50 will know what I’m talking about.

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Such was the insight at the Promotion Marketing Association's Annual Integrated Marketing Conference last week, for marketers struggling against store labels.

It's a hot topic and the basis for a Marketing News feature story coming out this spring.

Sales for store brands increased by 4.5% in the first quarter this year, while brand sales went down about 3%, Dennis Moore, president of analytic consulting for ACNielsen, said at the Chicago conference last Wednesday. Naturally, the main motivating factor is price, particularly now. And regarding that part of the battle, there's no way brands can win, said Paul Kramer, COO of Westport, CT-based Catapult Marketing, during IMC's Great Agency Panel on Tuesday, March 10. "Competition on price is a dead end for 99 out of 100 manufacturers," he said. "The strategy in the marketplace is to reinforce the emotional bond we provide customers."

Simon Hay, CEO for Cincinnati-based dunnhumby USA, a satellite of the London-based consumer research and consultancy company, said that some old habits regarding shopper marketing strategy die hard, but they need to die, beginning with the core mentality that drives business decisions.

"People think of shopper marketing as another way to rent market share each week," Hay said at his IMC keynote presentation last Wednesday. "The idea is not about the customer but, 'Am I beating the competition?'"

"Most manufacturers are lagging in their efforts to understand their loyal shoppers and treat them well," he later said, adding that the question shouldn't be "How can I make shoppers more loyal to my brand?" but "Am I focusing most of my efforts on my best shoppers?"

Hay said there is too much obsession with market share statistics, too much focus on short term results, and that retailers and manufacturers need to work together in placing the customer first and improving their communications and sales.

Hay also said there is too little scrutiny on marketers' efforts to drive sales. "The redemption rates for coupons in 2008 on average was 5%, with 1% redemption rates," Hay said, citing Nielsen. ""We have to ask ourselves this question: 'How can 95% failure be considered a success?'"

So are you waging war on the store brands? If so, what kind of strategies are you using? What's working? What isn't working or won't work? What do you want to try? Please post your war stories, or you can contact me directly at plevy@ama.org. We may even feature you as a source for our upcoming piece about the fight against private labels.

Posted by Piet at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Answer to the former - almost always yes. Answer to the latter - most definitely. See for yourself.

The Will It Blend? video series and Bike Hero video are two solid examples of YouTube marketing that generated a whole lot of buzz and hits. Both marketing campaigns were featured in the article "I Tube, YouTube," which appears in the latest issue of Marketing News.

Will It Blend? was the brainchild of Blendtec, a primarily B-to-B blender manufacturer in Utah. Over the course of nearly 100 videos over two years, Blendtec's tongue-in-cheek, highly destructive YouTube videos have been seen more than 200 million times, generating a 700% increase in sales for the company's products. The videos have gotten such a large following, more people have subscribed to the Blendtec YouTube site than to Barack Obama's YouTube channel.

As a one-off, Bike Hero, made to promote the Activision Blizzard video game Guitar Hero World Tour, was one of the most buzzed about videos of 2008, generating over a million views in just a few days. The elaborate piece, showcasing a bicyclist's epic journey through a real world Guitar Hero-style course, was put together by Droga5. It created some controversy and backlash - the video was positioned as user-generated, not the work of an ad company - but there was more praise than criticism among Guitar Hero lovers.

Find out more about these examples, and tips for successful YouTube marketing, in the March 15th issue of Marketing News.

Roll 'em!

Posted by Piet at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's March. We've escaped the winter doldrums and are fast approaching a sunnier spring. Let's hope that statement serves as an analogy for our economic situation, as well.

That said, we at Marketing News are taking an optimistic-- but realistic-- approach to our story selection this year, choosing not to dwell on the negative and instead to help you navigate through these troubling times and plan for a rosier future.

In our March 30th issue, we're running the second story in our "Get in the Game" series, offering you tools, tactics and strategies that could help you survive and win during and after this recession. Check out staff writer Piet Levy's feature story on word-of-mouth marketing called "Get the Word Out."

Also in this issue:

- Our cover story, "Solving the CMO Puzzle," discusses the reasons behind head marketers' quick turnover at the top and what it takes to cement their spot in the C-suite.

- In "Check Your Head," Editorial Director John Frank takes a look at emotion tracking in ad research.

- And columnist Michael Krauss discusses how choice architects can help marketers "nudge" consumers to make certain purchase decisions.

Please read our March 30th issue, on its way to Marketing News readers this week, and let us know what you think.

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A costly campaign that put replications of pieces from New York's Museum of Modern Art was vandalized last week - by the campaign's own creator, seemingly without the client's consent.

Doug Jaeger, CEO of brand management agency the Happy Corp, created a campaign for MoMA that lead to 57 pieces being reproduced in posters that flooded Brooklyn's Atlantic-Pacific subway station.

But less than two weeks later, several of the pieces were alterered by Jaeger and buzz-building New York street artist Poster Boy, an anti-consumerist artist who makes it a mission of transforming posters and billboards into visual set pieces, according to New York Magazine. A replica of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe painting depicts the movie star recovering from a nose job, and an abstract mural has what looks to be the tail end of an Indy race car sticking out from it.

Jaeger took credit for the stunt, telling the magazine "What I would hope is that it would cause debate and generate some argument, at a minimum."

What it has generated is anger, and apparent embarassment, out of CBS Outdoor advertising and MoMa, respectively.

MoMa's distanced itself from the controversy, with spokeswoman Kim Mitchell denying authorization of the vandalism. Jodi Senese, CBS Outdoor's executive vice-president of marketing, implied complacence by the art museum.

"As far as we're concerned, the Happy Corp is MoMa's agent and has been throughout this entire process," Senese told New York. "They vandalized our property and they really got involved in vandalizing MTA property as well. I think it's a negative press image that they're pushing on the MTA and on us."

That may be the case, not just for MoMa, but specifically for Jaeger. Intentionally damaging a campaign behind a client's back doesn't speak well for his credibility, if, of course, that's how it really happened.

Click here to read the magazine's story on the campaign ambush, including some pics; and here to read the response from CBS Outdoor. And finally, here to read about the origins of the campaign, courtesy of The New York Times.

Posted by Piet at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Skittles.com is no more - at least not in the traditional sense.

Mars' sugary, fruity candy product unveiled the new Skittles.com site this week, which essentially isn't a full page at all, but a widget that guides visitors to outside social media sites. Click on the Friends tab, and you're taken to the Facebook home page. Click on Chatter, and you're transported to a Twitter page filled with Skittles-related Tweets. From the media tab, you can see Skittles videos directly on YouTube, and Skittles pictures on Flickr. And to find out about Skittles products, click on the products tab to learn more on Wikipedia.

With the new site, Skittles has essentially handed the keys to its official brand conversation to the consumers. The bold approach has gotten a slew of marketing blog buzz, and the brand has nearly 600,000 friends on Facebook. At the same time, there's been Tweets and Facebook posts that have very little to do with Skittles, and others that could be considered negative to the brand. "I threw up the last time I ate Skittles," posted Tyler on Facebook. "I don't like to taste the rainbow."

Click here to take a tour of the revised Skittles site (and look at its obvious inspiration, the nearly-year-old site for Boston ad agency Modernista!) and tell me, What do you think? Do Skittles and Modernista deserve kudos for showcasing social media over its own content? Is this the way of the future, or a short-lived stunt? Do consumers have too much control, or perhaps still, not enough?

Post away!

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