by Next Wave Team | Oct 21, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, VW advertising
The ads are running in prime time shows, they have people in suits standing around a car, talking about “Buick’s total value promise” – here is the transcription:
“Introducing the total value promise, from the award winning quality of Buick. I promise to stand behind your Buick, with our 4 year, 50,000 mile new vehicle warranty, and the serenity of a quiet tuned interior, I promise you the security of On-Star, Our 2006 LaCrosse has standard side curtain air bags, and V-6 power with an estimated 30 miles per gallon highway, the LaCrosse CX is under 22,600 after all applicable offers, see your Buick dealer – today.
Now of course, it has the car ad production feel- with a different talented actor for each line, and you see beauty shots of the car, but- is it talking about your new car- or theirs?
One of my favorite quotes in advertising comes to mind here:
“When people talk to themselves, it’s called insanity. When companies talk to themselves it’s called marketing.”
~Steve Bautista
Buick spent over $300,000 to produce this ad, and probably just as much to run it in ER- and it’s Buick - talking about what they think Buick is. How many people do you know will respond with “award winning quality” when you ask them what they think about Buick? Zero- and that’s probably even including Buick owners.
If there is a brand that absolutely has no persona, no cha-ching, no reason for being in the automotive category, it’s Buick- and its ads like this that get it there.
If there wasn’t a dealer pipeline to fill, and plants to run, Buick could go away tomorrow, and no one would miss them. A brand that hasn’t been relevant in a lifetime- except to old folks who still are reminiscing about a car company that hasn’t built a memorable car since, well, way back when.
Now GM is promising a “Total Value Promise” which means absolutely nothing- and bragging about a 50,000 mile/ 4 year warranty- has anyone looked at Hyundai lately (America’s Best warranty)? If you have such quality- go for the gusto and promise something more than a “quiet tuned interior.” To see the difference between an ad that means something and this drivel- see the post below about another GM division- one that gets it. This brand is dead.
For comparison- try to catch the ads for the New Passat from VW- talking about all the new features- demonstrating them to the customer- showcasing the little things that people fall in love with with a car- like hooks for hanging grocery bags in the trunk- all to a delightful diddy- “Thank you very much”- an ad that you want to watch again- and sing over and over in your head. When you visit the site- there is a mini-site that has some humorous little films like showing an elephant drop a log on command- which of course demonstrates a remote “trunk release.” Which do you think will sell more cars?
What do you think?
You can read about Buick’s follow up folly on Mark Silveira’s Ordinary Advertising blog
by Next Wave Team | Oct 21, 2005 | Advertising, Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, How To Select An Ad Agency
My father bought one of the first Saturns. Four doors, A/C, 5 speed manual, FM radio- no haggle cheap transportation. He still has his plastic car and it runs like a champ. When Hal Riney and Partners started with that “A different kind of car, a different kind of car company” people just thought it was another tagline.
Well all these years later, I read a story my dad sent me from Business Week and get this- they really are a different kind of car company:
Recently, a man called Saturn’s customer-service number with a big problem: His daughter’s car had broken down in Arizona, and she was stranded. He reported her location, her license plate number — and the fact that her car was a Honda (HMC).
DIRECT ACTION. When the Saturn representative pointed this out to the upset father, he said “You’re the company that cares about people, and that’s why I called you.” What would your company do? Saturn sent out a truck to pick her up, towed her Honda, and let her father know that she was safe.
Think about it: competitive brand, no warranty card, absolutely no reason to help. Except that there’s no substitute for this kind of concrete action when it comes to creating a brand with real meaning.
How many times do you not go back to a restaurant because of one bad experience? Or not shop at a store again because someone was rude to you? It’s always been said that do something wrong and someone tells 10 people, do it right, and they may tell 1, or possibly none.
Sure, Saturn may take this story and turn it into one of those warm and fuzzy commercials (or they may not- since they can’t afford to tow every car that breaks down) but it comes back to no matter what your ads say- your company has to over deliver.
Bad ads may kill a company slowly, but great ones will kill a bad company faster. All business is one-to-one, even in the days of the Internet- your user experience governs how likely you are to do business with that company again.
The BW story continues:
It’s the sum total of all your actions. Yes, positioning messages and advertising imagery play a supporting role in developing your brand identity, but what really matters is what you do and how that makes people feel.
And everything matters. If you want to make a great brand, you need to pay attention to all the ways it gets expressed in the world. How is the user manual written? How does the off/on switch sound? How do you hire people? How does the receptionist answer the phone? All of these things are as important as expressions of your brand as an ad campaign.
So when building your brand story, don’t forget to teach your employees how to live it as well.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Oct 13, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of TV
I wrote about this back on 4/3/2005, Cable system DVR’s are not the future, and yesterday Apple released new iPods that can play video. Immediate reaction of people- who wants to watch TV on a little iPod screen- that’s right up there with the IBM chairman Thomas Watson Sr. estimating the global market for computers at ‘about five or six’ in 1946.
The big deal isn’t seeing video on the iPod- it’s that you can now buy last night’s episode of Lost for $1.99. I’m not sure if that’s with or without commercials, but, soon, imagine it’s $1.99 without commercials- or free (or cheaper) if you download and ACTUALLY watch commercials that are targeted to you.
That is the future- and it just came to you via Apple computer.
Currently the video is not high resolution to play on your TV- but, that will change as codec’s improve. TiVo may just be seeing the end of their business model, or it may be the beginning, if they figure out a way to sell programs direct too.
A message to the “Broadcast” industry- your days are numbered. To the producers of quality content, you may be seeing a bigger piece of the pie coming your way. How many people will skip paying HBO and buy the Soprano’s direct? A season subscription for $50- I’d buy it.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Oct 8, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy
Every week The Dayton Business Journal publishes a “list” of the top 12 or 24″ players” in a field from Hospitals to Title firms, and once a year they publish their “List of Advertising Agencies” which is always good for a few laughs by those of us in the business.
As I am fond of saying, “Good research is expensive, bad research is more expensive” (in case this is instantly apparent- the cost of doing the wrong thing because you did your research poorly is always more expensive than doing the right research to begin with). The Business Journal’s methodology is suspect at best. They fax a questionnaire out to the agencies they have identified- never telling us how many it is sent to then they take the responses, without verifying the answers, and compile a “ranking” based on number of employees, or gross billings as reported, and this creates their “List.” I don’t claim that my list of agencies that aren’t The Next Wave is complete, but I update it every time I run across another firm, and it has links to other resources.
I was going to buy the 10″ x 1″ ad at the bottom of this Years Agency list to promote my list- but they only are going to have 12 agencies this year- a half page, because they didn’t get enough responses. How lame is that. I admit, after not being included last year (when I had my largest employee count and billings) and seeing smaller firms on the list, I wrote “why bother” on my questionnaire and sent it back.
The wonderful ad rep that I deal with at the Business Journal suggested I talk to the publisher. She transferred me, I left a message and got a call back from the Editor, who was about as flexible in her thinking as a brick wall. So, according to the Dayton Business Journal there are only 12 Ad Agencies in Dayton. End of story (except here).
Not only that, I tried to explain to them how a list could be complete and useful like my list, but they aren’t interested. They have to be able to rank agencies by size or employee count, I feel that alphabetical works just fine. I offered other ways to rank- number of awards won per employee was one 🙂 No matter, they will republish their list in an annual publication called “The Book of Lists” which is just as worthless. They hawk it for $29 and describe it as:
“PERFECT for: Sales Prospecting, Job Search, Fundraising, and Business Research”.
I call it a poorly researched advertising vehicle.
If you are looking for a list of advertising and design firms in Dayton OH, and surrounding areas, Agencies that aren’t The Next Wave is your best resource. You can contact their publisher to let her know that incomplete lists are a waste of your time and that a complete list would improve their publication. Or you can just use our List of Advertising Agencies in Dayton.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Sep 30, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web, Web strategy
How long does it take for a campaign to launch for the big boy of media- network TV? How do you reach a lot of people fast? Is the Superbowl ad the way to go?
Forget what you know- and what you think you know- blogs spread faster, especially among cutting edge opinion makers and early adopters.
Today these stats were being bandied around on adrants:
that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network. The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let’s say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so.
It’s no longer the size of your budget that matters, it’s the quality of the content. Mckinney Silver of Durham NC created a scavenger hunt for the new Audi A3 they used a variety of media- including network tv to launch, but the numbers showed that on day 10- in the case study- that the interest was coming from blogs.
And- as a note- for a big-time agency- that “gets the web”- their really expensive Flash based site gets them 8 pages indexed in Google- with no real content showing up in the search results- another example of an agency telling people to do what I say- not as I do.
Blogs connect you with customers. Learn it, repeat it, do it, and link away.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Sep 24, 2005 | Advertising, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Marketing & the Web
I’ve tried to explain this too many times in meetings, so here it is on paper. Just because you can “Blog” on a WordPress powered site, doesn’t mean you have to.
The word “Blog” is still not understood by a lot of people, they think it has to be like a journal, a daily entry of whatever one feels like writing. Yes, it can be, there are a lot of very bad, very boring “Blogs” out there.
That doesn’t mean it has to be like that for business.
WordPress is an open-source (meaning the code that runs it is open to the developers who work on it collectively for free) software program that runs on the server (the computer that hosts a web site). It can run on any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) but I prefer to run it on Linux- another open source solution. It requires the backend database, MySQL and PHP (both open source software solutions). It takes very little time to install and have up and running compared to trying to do a conventional HTML site in something like Dreamweaver (or GoLive or if you are desperate: Frontpage) even using templates.
Wordpress is a database driven display system for information that one, or multiple users can enter data in easily- and have it display as properly coded HTML that is searchable and works well with search engines like Google, Yahoo and the like.
This allows any company to keep their information up to date, quickly, efficiently, and with “good” code that is readable by search engines and even people using screen readers (who are visually impaired).
It does this by generating code that uses CSS (cascading style sheets), which is a lot like using a style sheet in a word processing document. This allows the owner of a WordPress site to change the look and feel of a site instantly by changing the CSS- or “Theme” by checking a check box. How easy is that? Try doing it with a hard coded site without CSS. Days, weeks. CSS is the smart persons way to build a site.
We have integrated the WordPress engine into other sites so you can barely tell it’s there: see the Rogero Buckman Architects news section, or this section of our site. Since adding the WordPress driven news section to our site hits have grown almost logarithmically every month. Not all hits generate business, but it has taken our site from being someplace that people stumble across, to a place that is actively showing up on the top page of Google search consistently.
One of the ways we have added to our sites popularity is our list of competitors. We had this on the site before, but it was static HTML, and was edited infrequently. Because of the ease of edit in WordPress, we update it as soon as we find a new firm. Why do we list our competitors you may ask? Well, we’re not afraid of competition and comparison to start off with, and because many ad agencies and design firms don’t use code that works well (or at all) with search engines. It’s actually kind of embarrassing. The point of the web is to deliver information- quickly and easily. We offer the list as a public service, since people searching for an ad agency or graphic design shop or marketing consultant in Dayton/Columbus/Cincinnati could be looking for us. It’s a basic part of marketing- being part of the evoked set- the set of options that comes to mind when thinking about purchasing a product or service- but I digress from the advantages of a WordPress blog. Soon people won’t turn to the Google local is on the upswing, but until it is more reliable, we provide this list as a service.
Another thing we’ve learned from our WordPress section of the site is that we can’t predict what search terms or phrases people use to find our competition or us. People type in odd things, and with our large numbers of marketing related words in our news section, we seem to hit more searches than our cheeky copy on the static part of the site.
It won’t be long before almost all sites are built around active engines like WordPress. Just as video production has been demystified by Apple with iMovie, and DVD creation with iDVD, WordPress is a tool that puts the power of the web into the hands of every business.
The ease of inserting links into text in WordPress also serves as an incentive to do it often. It may seem silly to some, but the frequency of links in and out are a key factor in search engine optimization. While incoming links are better than outgoing, links begat more links- trust me.
Every article in WordPress is a separate page. This is very important to your site’s visitors. How often have you navigated deep into a site, found some information that you wanted to share- and tried to send that page to a co-worker and couldn’t do it? The site was probably either built in Flash or Frames- both bad for Search- and bad for bookmarking and sharing. You can click on the title to this article and send it as a link to as many people as you want. It will also show up in Google as a complete, single page, with a descriptive snippet of text under it. A simple way to see what Google sees of your site is by going to Google and typing in site:yoursiteurl.com (or biz or net etc.) and seeing how many pages you index and what they show to visitors- I’ve made the link to this site so you can see how The Next Wave.biz site indexes.
This is a longer article than I planned to write, but this is an important subject. There are a few other key strengths to WordPress: the content is searchable, it’s organizable (using categories) and best of all, it provides RSS feeds that allow people to subscribe to you site and be notified every time you post- saving you from having to PUSH your message out with e-mail (which more people are starting to consider SPAM if it isn’t addressed individually and customized- but that’s another story).
I found this short article, “WordPress, or “How I finally built the website I needed” on someone else’s experience with WordPress and it inspired me to write this. Hopefully now, I won’t have to spend as much time explaining why a Blog is a site and is a highly effective business tool. And maybe a few of my clients will finally understand why I want to update their sites to use it.
What do you think?
