Very interesting campaign from Frito-Lay and great overview article by Tanya Irwin in MediaPost:

Lay’s is kicking off a nationwide experiential tour featuring the company’s potato farmers.

The PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division brand is using a mobile greenhouse designed to bring a rural farm experience to city-based consumers. The six-city tour kicked off July 26 in New York City’s Times Square. Other cities on the tour are Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas.

Visitors to the 70-foot-long, 10-foot-wide and 14-foot-high traveling greenhouse can see plants that result in the ingredients in the potato chips and meet a Lay’s potato farmer. Interactive displays also are available. Consumers will find out about the tour via public relations, Facebook, Twitter and any local media coverage. The Lay’s campaigns are supported by multiple agency partners: Juniper Park (advertising) OMD (media buying), The Marketing Arm (events) and Ketchum (public relations).

The tour is an extension of the ad campaign that launched last year featuring the farmers that grow potatoes for Lay’s, says Linda Bethea, Lay’s brand manager, potato chip portfolio.

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Endeavour Marketing and Media

From AdAge (original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For some marketers, a new year means a new agency. If that’s your company’s annual resolution, you should know that line of thinking will lead to a bad reputation in adland.

Agency new-business executives and industry search consultants report a growing blacklist of sorts, composed of marketers that tend to put ad duties into play every year or two. Thanks to rapid turnover in the chief marketing officer seat (a CMO’s tenure averages 28 months, according to the most recent figures from executive search firm Spencer Stuart) and pressure to perform amid the troubled economy, long-lasting agency-marketer relationships are becoming more rare.

“I have a huge disagreement with people changing their agencies like they change their underwear,” said Jane Bedford, partner at the Bedford Group, a consultancy based in Atlanta. “Our clients tell us it takes them about three to six months for them to get fully engaged with their agencies. It’s very difficult for an agency to get up and running, and totally please the client, within the first year.”

And that’s coming from an exec who actually benefits when accounts go into review.

Take Chipotle: In January 2004, the burrito chain tapped Mother, New York, to be its first advertising agency. Six years later, that account has cycled through four different shops: After Mother came TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder, Colo.; Devito/Verdi, New York; Butler Shine Stern & Partners, San Francisco; and, its latest, hired this month, Compass Point Media, a division of Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis.

Thinking twice
The regularity with which Chipotle changes its agencies is more than most. But it’s hardly the only marketer with a penchant for flitting from shop to shop. Retailer Ikea and luxury automaker BMW are known for frequently reviewing their creative and media accounts, and Mitsubishi Motors North America moves its ad business around a fair amount as well.

Too many reviews could also mean that, over time, the very best shops will think twice before going after those accounts. “Agencies do a risk assessment when deciding whether to pitch an account, and there’s definitely a toxicity factor they look at. If [a client] does a lot of reviews, the client gets blacklisted,” Ms. Bedford said.

Even at a time when agencies are hungry for more revenue, such flip-flopping has consequences: Two different new-business executives said two accounts they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole are 1-800-Flowers and Quiznos, as the businesses seem to be too volatile, regardless of their billings. The marketers did not respond to requests for comment.

Another consequence is cost: Constantly opening reviews can be incredibly costly and disruptive to both the marketer — for whom travel and other fees associated with agency reviews racks up — and the agencies, which shell out thousands of dollars in the hopes of crafting the perfect pitch that could win the business. If they do land it, there’s often an added cost of having to quickly ramp up freelance and full-time staff to work on the new account.

Michael Houston, chief marketing officer at Grey, New York, said the window for agencies to prove themselves has lowered dramatically.

“Results in our business are no longer evaluated on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, but on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis,” Mr. Houston said. “Couple that with the level of dollars attached to the advertising line item on a client’s balance sheet, and we find clients forced to justify their marketing ROI in a way never seen before. In that process, agencies sometimes become the scapegoat, with the easy solution being to call an agency review.”

Consistency
What’s more, “serial reviewers” risk damaging their brand with inconsistent marketing messages.

“Clients shouldn’t be constantly jumping ship,” said Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at AAR Partners. As communication between consumer and client evolves, “they need to work together with their agencies. If that foundation is constantly changing, the marketer is hurting themselves in the long run in terms of building brand loyalty with the consumer.”

The Association of National Advertisers, the marketer’s trade group, doesn’t exactly see it this way. The ANA’s position is that conducting formal agency evaluations on a regular basis offers the best chance for fixing problems before frustration sets in. It believes that the companies that have two-way assessments at regular intervals have the most-productive relationships. “Having a formal agency evaluation process is always imperative but even more so at a time of heightened focus on marketing accountability,” Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the ANA, has said.

Said Grey’s Mr. Houston: “Desperation may be something new to many industries in the recession, but it’s something the agency business has known, embraced and perpetuated for decades. Agencies only have themselves to blame by playing right into the hands of these serial agency-review ‘players’ [and] making it too easy for the client to bully us.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

Can Facebook, Capitol Hill be friends? Lawmakers learn social networking.

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Inside the headquarters of the National Republican Congressional Committee, 25-year-old Adam Conner — registered Facebook lobbyist, poster of multiple Obama attaboys and a guy whose Facebook photo is a grizzly bear wielding two chain saws — sits to teach a course. The subject: How to use Facebook better. His student: Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.).

“If we’re going to improve our presence on Facebook and really maximize it, what would you recommend as tangible steps?” Roskam asks, thumbing his BlackBerry.

“It looks like you’re very comfortable with your BlackBerry,” Conner replies earnestly. “Maybe commit to a status message a day? A photo a week? Dive deeper. You’ll be surprised at how things that seem routine to you as a congressman are so interesting and cool to constituents.”

Conner is Facebook’s evangelist in Washington, a social-networking pro summoned by elected officials and bureaucrats alike to teach them, free of charge, how to leverage Facebook — within strict government rules and security guidelines. The mere existence of Conner’s hand-holding lessons illustrates the cultural gulf between Washington and Silicon Valley, and spotlights the complex web of congressional rules that limit social networking among federal workers.

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From Nathaniel Perez for Fast Company (original article)

While brands still try hard to “crack the Social Media code,” most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. After all, what’s so novel about the thought of a friendship with my butter? Precisely, nothing.

The impact of social media at the heart of new media is shaking up how brands think of experience design and what consumers expect from brand experiences.

Let’s talk digital sociology. I’ll quote three impactful points of view from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In his series called “The machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the politics of Authenticity,” he describes the following (which I’ve roughly transcribed):

• “Media defines us while we define media.”
• “We’ve shifted from media to mediated relationships.”
• “Connections were the constraint, we now have connections without constraint.”

How can these statements help us understand how to be better at building brand through social media and digital experiences in general? Here’s a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful “social movements” around brands.

• You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
• From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial.  Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
• Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
• Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
• Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.

While butter brands of the world now have their work cut out for them, I’m hoping they’ll leverage Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or their own media as mere interaction vehicles while devoting their attention to understanding the essence of consumer engagement within the media. Only then can they design experiences that shape conversation, to then understand how those conversations have shaped their brand.

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro TN Advertising Agency

From Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs.com) for American Express Open Forum:

Dec 29, 2009 -

What do bacon, Bogota, yumberries and Foursquare have in common? They are all on the list of 100 Things to Watch in 2010 by the marketing communications company JWT.

Certain trends on the list suggest clear implications for businesses. JWT’s Ann Mack says that many items on it reflect broader shifts, like a growing action around health and wellness and environmental issues, to crazy-fast developments in the tech space.

There are also a number of trends tied to the so-called Great Recession (“trip bundling,” for example) and those that speak to various demographic, political and economic power shifts (“East Africa Wired,” and “TV for Tween Boys” among them). Interestingly for business, Mack says, the list “points to the way industries are redefining or reinventing themselves to survive or to fully leverage these power shifts.”

What trends might affect your small business in 2010? Here a subset you might find worth watching (as well as a few I found just plain interesting). The full list is in alphabetical order, below.

1. 3D at Home
3D is the new HD. Having successfully invaded the big screen, it’s on its way to the small screen: James Cameron, director of the new 3D film Avatar, will promote Panasonic’s 3D sets, out next year, which will compete with versions from Sony and Samsung.

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Branded Virtual Goods Are Presents for Marketers, Too

Online Gifting Campaigns From Nestle, Malibu Have Trumped Banner Ad Results on Facebook

by Rita Chang
Published: December 21, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — In a sign that virtual goods aren’t just the province of gaming anymore, marketers from Anheuser-Busch to 3M have offered up free virtual wares for social-media mavens to pass around to their friends. But how well have these online “gifts” paid off?

Chances are, if you’re a Facebook-aholic, you have either received or even sent a branded virtual gift — really, a display ad by any other name. Recently, a pair of virtual-gifting campaigns by Malibu Rum and Nestle have yielded results that trump banner ads on the social-networking site, suggesting that virtual goods may be another way for marketers to reach consumers who are spending more and more time interacting with each other online.

Offered through a number of Facebook application catalogs, Nestle’s virtual cookies were the companion to birthday and congratulatory wishes. For the food giant, the goal was to translate its offline “Bake some love” campaign into a compelling online experience, providing a social vehicle for users to engage with the brand and share stories with each other. Users can personalize and embed photos of themselves into the virtual cookies.

“Nestle wanted to be an enabler for sharing stories, especially baking stories,” said John Nitti, digital director at Zenith Media. “We wanted to be part of that experience and do it in an organic way.”

Over two week-long periods in October and November, users sent more than 1.1 million Nestle Toll House cookies. The campaign registered a 16% brand lift, and a 17% lift in intent to purchase. About 3% of the people opened the cookie gifts, compared to the 0.02% to 0.04% who click on Facebook banner ads.

Malibu Rum did a similar campaign, as it sought to remind 20-somethings to make the distilled beverage part of their summer fun. Over two weeks last summer, more than 1 million virtual Malibu Rum drinks were sent; 7% of the users opened them, netting a 7% brand lift.

These campaigns have the potential to generate multiple brand impressions: Apart from the first impression when the gift is sent, usually as an image, users also receive a confirmation message that the recipient saw the gift. Other impressions occur when the recipient sees the image, and still more impressions would result if users post the cookies and drinks on their Facebook profile page.

“There’s deep integration in the user experience, and there’s social endorsement built into them,” said Paul Martecchini, VP-marketing at AdNectar, which ran Nestle and Malibu Rum’s virtual-goods campaigns. “These drinks aren’t coming from Malibu Rum, it’s people advocating a brand they’re passionate about.”

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Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Mufreesboro TN Advertising Agency

By Kenneth Hein of Brandweek

Smashed up, semi-conscious and bleeding may be how Tiger Woods was discovered three days ago. However, his reputation as a top brand endorser should remain relatively unscathed, according to sports marketing experts.

Woods is currently the face of some of the world’s biggest companies. Accenture, American Express, AT&T, EA Sports, Gatorade, Gillette and Nike are among the brands to which he has ties. All told, he pulls in about $100 million annually in endorsement deals, per Forbes.

Allegations of infidelity and other stories that are currently swirling will not greatly affect his abilities as an endorser, said David Schwab, vp, Octagon Sports Marketing’s First Call and managing director of athletes and personalities. “If it’s only a spat and the story is what we’ve seen, then it doesn’t affect him,” Schwab said. “He is unique in terms of his global appeal, size and long-term ability. He’s not like a prime-time actor competing with 30 other competitors. He doesn’t compete with anyone.”

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By Christine Huang for AdAge:

The fourth Futures of Entertainment conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium took place at MIT before the holidays, bringing together scholars and key thinkers from across TV, advertising, activism, new media and beyond. The hot topic of the weekend was transmedia.

A primer for those unfamiliar with the term: transmedia is that which moves across multiple channels of communication. Professor Henry Jenkins (formerly of MIT, now at USC), a transmedia scholar and founder of the Convergence Culture Consortium, distills the concept further: “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”

But transmedia approaches are applicable anywhere a narrative is formed. Here are four key takeaways from the conference for brands and advertisers to consider in this new transmedia age:

1. Make stories drillable. Jenkins, the event’s keynote speaker, highlighted “drillability” as his first key principle of transmedia storytelling, pointing out the importance of creating narratives that resonate widely as well as deeply. While many storytellers and brands focus on spreading their narratives horizontally—across platforms, networks, users, etc.—it’s in their vertical foundation, their drillability, that lasting engagements are formed.

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LONDON (AdAge.com) — Some 300 attendees gathered at the Saatchi Gallery last week for Ad Age sibling Creativity’s technology conference, Creativity and Technology, were treated to musings on bleeding-edge digital communication from Europe’s top talent in advertising, technology and design. Speakers ranged from agency creatives and technologists to writers such as Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware” and head of design direction at Nokia.

Here are a eight takeaways from the conference if you missed it.

Curation is key
In a world of too many choices, both online and off, use your expertise to give consumers a small set of options in order to manage expectations. Choice is not always healthy, said Marko Balabanovic, head of innovation at Last Minute Labs, the exploration arm of travel site LastMinute.com. For the travel category, disappointment is inevitable in a digital, searchable world with too many choices — every selection could result in a consumer asking, “Could I have made a better decision?” But, if you don’t have overwhelming choice, you can’t regret making the wrong one. Read Rest of Article