by Joyce Turner-Gionet | Jun 30, 2015 | Advertising, Branding, Creative, Latest
It depends.
If the celebrity fits the brand and the spot acts as a springboard to elevate and personify the brand, then it’s good creative. Last year, Matthew McConaughey was in the driver’s seat for the new Lincoln Motor’s (luxury division of Ford Motor Company) MKC. According to ET Canada, sales for Lincoln shot up 25%, to their highest level in seven years. In this case, the campaign ads inadvertently also inspired a celebrity bonanza with Ellen Degeneres, Conan O’Brien and Canada’s Jim Carrey revvin’ their comedy engines to parody the commercials. A link to one of the MKC commercials is below and for those who haven’t seen it, just for giggles, I’ve included a link to Ellen’s parody. The parodies ended up driving the outcome, so the MKC ad spots got even more attention than they otherwise might have, thanks to … celebrity coverage.
There’s considerable financial investment attached to celebrity endorsement. The cost of the celebrity as a brand ambassador has to be weighed against ultimate traction for the brand, particularly for small companies with shallow pockets. So much about building brand and brand awareness is about breaking through the clutter. Yes, the right celebrity can cut through clutter like a warm knife through butter, but that warm knife also slices off a major part of your advertising budget. Don’t forget frequency of the message. In any company, large or small, there are only so many advertising dollars to go around. For the strongest traction, dollars need to be used on a message that’s seen frequently and for best results, spread across more than one medium.
Celebrity Endorsements: There is risk involved.
There’s the danger of the celebrity overriding the brand. What’s actually being sold? The celebrity or the brand? It pays to be careful.
There’s also credibility. Today’s consumers demand truth, which goes back to my first point: a celebrity must fit the brand. If something smells fishy, someone will Tweet the stink and quickly. Consumers are savvy enough to know that any celebrity is in it partly for the money. But it’s a fine line; if the celebrity is perceived as just in it for the money then brand suffers. There’s got to be authenticity; like Cher modeling Marc Jacobs’ stuff this month. Can you think of anyone who could better carry off this Marc Jacob’s dress? Talk about brand revitalizing for Cher too! Makes me want to go back and revisit her ‘Dark Lady’ lyrics, “The fortune queen from New Orleans …” (Yes, Cher really is almost 70!) In this case, endorsement is mutually beneficial, working for Jacobs and for Cher.
[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#CelebrityEndorsements”]Celebrities can energize a brand or re-energize one.[/inlinetweet] They can change consumer perception of a brand, even old and dusty ones. Remember Proctor and Gamble’s ‘new’ Old Spice Man, ex-football player Issaiah Mustafa. ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”. It spoke to men and to women, the ones that typically buy after-shave or cologne for “their men.” The spot helped reenergize a brand that was, at that point, as old as Cher on her next birthday. Done by Wieden and Kennedy out of Portland Oregon, with more than 65 million views on YouTube, it’s still one of the most successful ad campaigns, ever.
There is a downside, of course: If a celebrity puts a foot wrong, or the ad campaign hits a nerve. Think Tiger’s troubles (even shareholders of his sponsor companies lost billions!). Think Rob Lowe’s recent spots for DirecTV which ticked off a rival cable company enough to lodge a formal complaint and one particular spot that incensed the International Paruresis Association (also called shy bladder disease, a surprisingly common social phobia in which people who have trouble doing their business with other people around). The ads were cancelled.
[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#CelebrityEndorsements”]Done well, celebrity endorsements can be a big boost for brand.[/inlinetweet] Gone wrong, they’re a PR nightmare. But at the end of the day, a celebrity is still an actor and no celebrity endorsement goes far without good creative backing it. Just make sure your ad budget can support the star light.
View the Celebrity Endorsements:
[dt_sc_one_third_inner first][youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoGGDKV88Fg][/dt_sc_one_third_inner]
[dt_sc_one_third_inner ][youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K69chHMtrs4][/dt_sc_one_third_inner]
[dt_sc_one_third_inner ][youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE][/dt_sc_one_third_inner]
by Miriam Hara | Jun 26, 2015 | Branding, Communications, Latest, Social Media
When is too much, too much? Have we reached the over exposure point? Nowadays we get “news” (perhaps a better word is “info” since whether it’s all “news” is often debatable) from so many different sources. We see the same celebrity on TV, on magazine covers, on websites, in commercials, we get them tweeting, they post on Facebook. Often, it’s to the point of nausea … the celebrity has achieved over exposure. Malcolm Gladwell coined the phrase the ‘tipping point’ years ago and it stuck: “the moment when an idea, trend or behavior tips, and spreads like wildfire.” Over-exposure is like a tipping point gone wrong. Suddenly, things come to a head and everyone’s sick of hearing about that celebrity. When things reach this point, you actually get an outcome opposite to the desired reaction. Fans experiencing celebrity fatigue are turned off, tuning out any more news on that celebrity. They accuse the celebrity of chasing the “star light” (or hogging the limelight). Too much exposure is, in effect, too much.
The same is true for technology. We’re all (most of us) tech-savvy. Information is quite literally, always at our fingertips. Over stimulation leads to information fatigue, leading to an inability to process any more information. We live in an age of instant technological accessibility. I was reading a piece in the April/May 2015 issue of Marketing, written by Russ Martin. He was chatting to Michael Howatson, CD at Toronto’s Sapient Nitro about overstimulation. A couple of lines stood out for me: “Now that everything from toasters to cars is web-enabled, there’s a surplus of data being thrown at consumers who are already nearing their capacity for information.1” I was amazed to read: “Humans take in 27,000 times the info every day that a person in the 1500s would have.2” 27,000 times! No wonder we’re overwhelmed. The chatter is unending. In fact, where will it end? Imagine getting up in the morning and having your toaster speak to you! Don’t laugh, it’s closer than you think.
Never have we been so connected to so many people (and so many things!) at any given moment. Granted, there’s an upside, especially when it comes to keeping family connections vibrant, maintaining long distance relationships and ensuring business growth. But there’s a downside and it’s dramatic: the line that once defined work/life balance is becoming blurred … sometimes non-existent.
Yes, technology-enabled accessibility has had a considerable positive impact for businesses and brands trying to break through the clutter.
Reaching people and building rapport has never been easier. However, our customers’ minds are already taxed by the barrage of emails and text messages that pour into their business and personal lives daily. Now add to that the additional rivers of extraneous media chatter channeled through to them from all access points –radio, TV, our PC, phone, iPAD, tablet, even newspapers, books and magazines.
For business, the social media channel is accessible to all and that has made customer accessibility effortless. That being said, businesses and brands may still be using outdated “objectives” in this new world.
I agree with Howatson: As a business and a brand, “If what you’re doing doesn’t solve a problem or make your customers’ lives better, then don’t do it3”. I’d add: Don’t risk your business or brand becoming labelled a star-light chaser … splashed everywhere, but with no good reason.
If nothing else, I hope this post was helpful and insightful. Maybe it will resonate with you, perhaps start a conversation in your business, as the Marketing piece resonated with me. If your brand is a rising star, be wary of burn out. Heed the adage: too much of anything is never a good thing.
1,2,3 Quotes are from Marketing, page 26, April/May 2015; marketingmag.ca. Our apologies, for some reason, even with our subscription, we couldn’t pull up the link to pass it on.
by Joyce Turner-Gionet | Jun 24, 2015 | Advertising, Communications, Creative, Latest
25+ years ago, copywriting jobs were few and far between. Most people had no clue what a copywriter did. Things have changed. With SEO, Social Media, tweeting and blogging, the opportunities for a career in copywriting have exploded. Mad Men made it sexy. Today, it’s often referred to as content creation. A company out to hire is looking for a ‘Content Creator’. One aspect of content creation that, in my eyes, is not given its due is catalog copywriting.
In Canada, think IKEA, Lee Valley or the Regal catalog. In the U.S., there’s L.L. Bean, J.C. Penney, Hammacher Schlemmer and Orvis (an icon of catalog shopping for almost 160 years). If you think about it, Mail Order (Direct Mail) catalogs were actually a precursor to Internet shopping? You couldn’t buy something locally, so you ordered it from a catalog and had it shipped. It could be argued that every online shopping experience, including Kijiji and ebay, is fundamentally catalog shopping.
Even in this age of technology, people love catalogues. They’re also brand loyal. I browse the IKEA catalog in print and from my phone. My 20-something daughters browse American Apparel’s catalogue online. At one company I worked for, which shall remain unnamed, we often got letters from prison inmates: “We love your catalogs, when’s your new one coming out? Can you send it so we can pass it around.” Granted, maybe we weren’t making any money off those folks at the time, but it makes the point.
When I started in the business, you either worked for an ad agency or you wrote catalog copy for a large retailer. Fresh out of university with an English degree (are you sure you can make money with that degree? my pragmatic father asked), I saw exactly one copywriting job advertised. It was writing catalog copy for Consumers Distributing. I was all over it! I must have rewritten my resumé ten times, even though my experience was slim pickins. Somehow, I got an interview. A scary, no-nonsense woman in an expensive navy blue power suit with a hair bun and imposing tortoise shell glasses interviewed me. Don Draper, she wasn’t. (But what a marvelous mentor she turned out to be!) “We’re looking for a workhorse. Tight deadlines. Lots of overtime. [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#CatalogCopywriting”]You need to make the products sound sexy in 30 words or less[/inlinetweet]. Can you make a coffee pot sound sexy?” she peered at me over the glasses.” I’d missed my bus, walked two miles in my cheap new ‘interview’ pumps and my feet were killing me. Desperate for a job and to prove to my dad that I could make money with my degree, I said something like: “Oh, absolutely. I can write anything!” (Wondering if I actually could make a coffee pot sound sexy and what my dad would think of me making it sound sexy?) I got the job — enthusiasm, not experience, won the day
As Thomas Jefferson, put it, “the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#CatalogCopywriting”] If catalog copywriting teaches you anything, it teaches you to be stingy with words[/inlinetweet]. It’s the boot camp of copywriting. Short, powerful, precise prose. It gets thoughts in shape, tones down wordiness, keeps the message lean. Forget ego, there’s no room. Snappy headlines and a photo generate interest, bold lead-ins draw the reader in and feature/benefit copy closes the sale. Personally, I think every fledgling copywriter should be required to put in an obligatory six months writing nothing but catalog copy. It forces one to be disciplined.
I have the greatest respect for catalog copywriters. [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#CatalogCopywriting”]A good one can take the writing to an art form.[/inlinetweet]
Seen a great piece of catalog copywriting? Send me a link.
by Miriam Hara | Jun 22, 2015 | Business Success, Latest, Social Media
Social media is not a single act … or a monologue. In order to achieve greatness (isn’t that what we’re all after!), a social media marketing strategy must embrace an internal social media culture. The use of social media must, and I repeat, must, be holistic.[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#SocialMediaCulture”] We live in an age of voyeurism. [/inlinetweet] People want to know the ins and outs of brands and companies. They want to see for themselves the truth in everything. A properly developed social media marketing strategy takes advantage of a social media platform to educate, inform and to showcase what companies’ philosophies are all about, what their culture is all about.
A social media marketing strategy that promotes one tone and culture for their external audience and another for their internal audience is destined to meet with confusion and failure. You’ll be outed sooner than soon.
Recently, I was asked to take a survey giving my opinion on embracing an internal social media platform that would be like a social media intranet … allowing company departments to communicate with one another. I admit, I was and still am a little confused about this concept. I’ll tell you why.
Social media is all about being social, inclusive and holistic with everyone. To ring true, it’s a conversation that must run internally and externally. Our company’s social media is, I believe, inclusive. In any successful corporate or branded social media initiative, the entire company is on board. Social Media isn’t just marketing, nor is it customer service, or sales. It’s all of these and more, all departments singing from the same song sheet … yes, that includes the accounting department! In other words,[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#SocialMediaCulture”] a business’s social media marketing strategy must incorporate all departments [/inlinetweet] and must make each department accountable for contributing to the overall social media initiative. That could take the form of staff or team members simply ‘liking’ a post, retweeting a comment, sharing an article, a post, or ‘how to’ video. All of these actions help fuel the integration of the business culture and business philosophy, leading to the success of the business’s social media platform, internally and externally.
As far as my opinion and receptiveness to an internal social media intranet, the concept just doesn’t ring true or right. If you’re doing it properly, your[inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#SocialMediaCulture”] Social Media should be a dimensional blend [/inlinetweet]; whether a business or brand, speaking to staff, clients and potential clients. Using social media as a platform allows you to speak to all of these segments. The use of LinkedIn Company pages, as with Facebook Brand pages, allows for communications between teams and followers alike. The actual channels may be different, but your tone, style, what you say, how you say it, the ways you choose to communicate should [inlinetweet prefix=”null” tweeter=”null” suffix=”#SocialMediaCulture”]remain true to your business and brand core[/inlinetweet]. A social media marketing strategy must always keep in mind that in today’s landscape, and that includes the internal corporate culture, people really are looking for the truth in things. If you live it inside the company, then outside the company it’s believable too: in other words, what is true, ultimately rings true.
by Miriam Hara | Jun 18, 2015 | Advertising, Business Success, Latest, Marketing, Social Media
As a skill, business writing isn’t new. Written expression has always been valued as a means of communication between departments within organizations. Few businesses can do without a key business writer.
Many feel a new dawn has arrived for business writing, making it more highly valued and sought after. With the advent of content marketing, businesses and corporations see strategic business writing as a skill they require from their marketing department. The hair-trigger reaction is to find someone to fulfill this important new “role”. But is this the most logical way to venture forward? In the brave new world of content marketing, what kind of writer does your business need?
Does the skill of business writing equal the skill of content creation?
The writing skill of a business writer may equal the writing skill of a content creator, but the skill sets are different. At the risk of sounding patronizing, not all writing “types” are the same. A journalist doesn’t write the same way as a novelist, or an editorial writer, or an investigative reporter, or a copywriter. Hence a business writer may not have the writing style or skill set needed for content marketing. Content marketing requires content creation, which requires not only basic business writing skills, but strategic and creative thinking. Those are the skills needed to propel content creation to the next level – getting the consumer interested and then engaged. A solid understanding and healthy respect for content development and creation is key to achieving content that resonates, eliciting the desired action from the consumer
Perhaps then, a content creator must be three parts writer and one part marketer: The writer must be investigative, inventive and devoted to engagement and the marketer ensures things relate back to brand, but not in an obvious way. It irks me when content is created under the guise of information, when in fact, it’s purely promotional. Shame on brand! Shame on business. Consumers today are savvy and they expect more from brands and businesses. Fortunately, in this new era, a good content creator understands and respects the difference. Businesses should too!
What are your thoughts on writing and on the new dynamic in the marketing landscape: Content marketing?
by Miriam Hara | Jun 15, 2015 | Advertising, Business Success, Latest, Social Media
“The advertising world is a young person’s game.” We have all heard this statement before – but is it accurate? Social media, although not in itself ‘advertising‘ has carved out its place within branding in an effort to establish brand relevancy. Similar to any other industry, advertising has evolved to include a ‘holistic‘ communication approach. Am I being naive by saying that there is indeed room for the 50+ marketer within social media – that we are not over the hill? Didn’t we also hear, “Today’s 50 is the new 40”?
It may come as a complete surprise to many that some people consider the 50+ executive to be over the hill. This kind of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that those over 50 should not be trying to navigate social media! Think about this: Did you know that the over the hill demographic is the fastest growing of Facebook users. More than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors. It would seem then that being over the hill, is about getting social! Forgive me, I digress.
My point is to speak about social media in the context of building a social media team. Has the business of social media taken on the same youthful persona as advertising? Is the perception of business and their corporate human resource management that the 50-something professional is over the hill and therefore not capable of embracing the new, fast-paced and ever-changing world of social media?
Here are a few reasons why any human resource manager should consider a 50-something applicant to be part of their social media team, (providing that they want to be part of a social media team):
They have people experience. They have business experience. They have process experience. They have team culture experience. They have life experience.
Couple this wealth of ‘experiences’ with these three core attributes that any candidate, regardless of age, needs to have:
Here’s another statement that we’ve all heard before that still rings true: “Don’t judge a book by its cover” – even if that cover is on your eReader screen. Tap open the book, swipe through the pages and you might be pleasantly surprised by what you learn.
