by Next Wave Team | Jul 23, 2006 | Advertising, BMW Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy
bmw motorcycle advertising - Google Search
If you search for “BMW Motorcycle Advertising” in Google- we’re the first hit- out of a lot (1,400,000) of search results. It’s not something that we write a lot about, but it showcases how we can get our subject matter to the top of Google- something that can be critical in being part of the evoked set for a buyer shopping for your product category.
If your company wants to get to the front page of Google- even when people are searching for your competitors- and, are interested in great marketing/advertising- instead of just search engine optimization, you would do better hiring The Next Wave than one of those big NYC agencies that BMW’s motorcycle division chief Laurence Kuykendall hired.
These days- brand relevancy is often accompanied by a lot of chatter on the web- and having people find your site, before finding someone who is not so kind to your products or service is one key to staying competitive.
by Next Wave Team | Jul 22, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Change the world, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Practical Marketing 101, Retail
Welcome to Room 116: Alex Bogusky says…
Alex Bogusky says…
- To creatives: “This is your company. What are you going to do to make it famous?”
- On approach: What’s really going on here?” If you can step outside your own culture, you can get an angle on what’s going on inside it.”
- “We always say, ‘Have faith in the process, even though you have to go through a period where you’re confused,’”
- “We don’t really believe in advertising”
- Bogusky uses a visual analogy to describe CP B’s methodology. At the center of his schema is the product destined to become famous, and around that are concentric circles that represent different means of marketing and advertising. The outermost circle–the one that takes the most effort to align with the essential brand message–represents traditional advertising. “We push the marketing toward the product,” Bogusky explains. “We spend all our time in the center: the product.”
- “The process is finding the questions first and coming up with answers,” says Bogusky. “After you come up with the questions, that leads you to finding the core [strategies].”
- “With MINI, it’s less about doing an ad and more about making it a part of the culture,” says Bogusky. “If we can come up with a lease that matches the personality of the car, that’s probably better than advertising.”
- Not from Alex, but still interesting: “[CP B] helped us look at all these consumer touchpoints, [and] mass marketing is just one of them,” Martin says. “The agency doesn’t call their work advertising, they call it creative content. They don’t call it media, they call it creative-content distribution.”
From Creativity, Print, Business 2.0, and Adweek.
Thanks to Brian Chiao for gathering these. This isn’t really supposed to be an all about Crispin Porter + Bogusky site- but, if the idea is to stimulate a discussion between our potential clients and The Next Wave- they need to know what interests us.
We used to require all clients to read “Ogilvy on Advertising” to have a common ground to begin discussing their brand evolution through advertising- now, we hope they read our site.
Is “Product focused Brand culture” the secret of great marketing?
One of the things Chuck Porter shared at a Cincinnati Ad Club meeting is that anyone can do a better price and product ad- just by having a lower price. Seems so obvious- but try telling that to every local car dealer, grocery store or window salesman.
If you think competing on price is a solution- you don’t need better advertising- you need a lobotomy.
Advertising and merchandising as a entertainment? Nothing that hasn’t been talked about before. Tom Peters showcased Stew Leonard’s grocery store in “In search of Excellence” in the early 80’s- the problem was- most in advertising never bothered to read many business books.
So- is Bogusky and company formulating the next eveolution of advertising or not?
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 22, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Careers in Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Design, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Marketing & the Web, Practical Marketing 101, Retail, Viral Marketing, VW advertising, Web strategy
Welcome to Room 116: Crispin Copies itself
It’s long- it’s full of off topic comments- and it focuses on the darlings of the ad world “Crispin Porter + Bogusky.” It started with an observation that some of the VW outdoor- looked a lot like the mini campaign.
I placed a comment at the end- that probably deserves reposting here- so here you go:
Ripping off oneself isn’t illegal- it used to be called “having a style” and- if something is proven to work- and the client is in deep shit- do it.
Some of you seem to have missed bothering to read the CP+B site- they build advertising like Detroit builds cars- not for long lasting practical lives- but like throw aways, planned obsolecence. It keeps them in business- and it keeps audiences entertained. They don’t strive for “Just do it” or “Got milk” - they are like a comedian on tour- each show has to evolve- or the audience won’t laugh.
Ad people and CMO’s are the only people who know what agency did what- most consumers just want to know who did that catchy little ditty on the Rabbit- “multiply” spot. Most consumers aren’t stupid enough to go out and buy a VW because of it- they still know that the cars suck.
Which brings us to a major point about CB+P- they actually go outside the halls of advertising- into the brand world the product lives in- and work on the touchpoints- that’s more than advertising and pretty pictures- that’s real marketing- something lost on most advertising students- I still believe CB+P thinks about actually selling things- as opposed to creating pop-culture (which from reading this thread- seems waaaay more important than discussing how to sell crappy cars).
For all of Crispin’s strengths- they still make mistakes- esp. with how they use the web to connect with their customers- they still are using it as a broadcast medium instead of a 2-way exchange.
And on BK- no one mentioned “subservient chicken” or “Ugoff”- both of which were brand changing positioners.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 20, 2006 | Advertising, BMW Advertising, Change the world, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Media, Practical Marketing 101, Retail, Search and Business, Viral Marketing, Web strategy
As many of you know, we run a seminar on using a blog (specifically WordPress) as a content management system for a business website. The news section of The Next Wave site (where you are now) was added in January of 2005 and now accounts for most of the traffic on our site.
Although we got an early start on having a website (our first site went up in 1994) and we soon figured (back while everyone was still on dial-up) that Flash wasn’t the way to build an entire site (later we looked really smart- since search engines and Flash don’t go together very well)- we were pretty slow to realize how important webstats are to providing customer feedback and marketing opportunities.
The reason: when our content didn’t change often, neither did our web stats. That all changed with the news/blog- and analyzing web stats has become one of the most important parts of our seminar. As you add content- people find your site using different search terms- and link to you for different reasons- these are all opportunities to do business or learn about your customers.
It’s how we decided to begin the seminars- and it’s also taught us a lot about how to build websites for our customers- so they can get more customers. Just like there are keywords- or trigger words in print advertising (Free- being the “best” one), search terms can tell you a lot about your customers hot buttons. For us, guerrilla ad campaigns, viral marketing, and non-traditional advertising have been hot topics- as have low-budget ads. In a highly competitive media environment, it’s become obvious that just spending more on traditional media isn’t a cost effective solution. The flip-side is, many of these potential clients aren’t willing to pay for the services to get the “more bang for your marketing buck” to the agency for coming up with the “big idea.”
One of the places we find the big idea for a client- or at least get a start on the idea, is by searching through their well crafted website stats- where the search terms can show what’s on customers minds. Think of a website stats package as a way to eavesdrop on your virtual sales floor- as if you had a way to listen to every single customer that had an interest in your products.
When we land a retail client, we like to do site studies- where we observe customer interactions with our clients staff, the environment, the product, the sales process- and then make suggestions on improvements. We also visit the competition and do the same analysis. We want to discover what drives your most profitable customers to shop with you – and how to find more like them. We can do the same with visiting your sites backend- analyze, review, and build new strategies to connect and close the sale.
To repeat what we’ve said before- it’s imperative for a business to post all marketing materials online, in a place with a unique url link, and in a format that can be shared. Let the customer print your ad, own your TV spot, be able to listen to your radio spot over and over if they so choose. Even better- let them link back to your page, comment on the ad, be able to find out everything they can about it- because it most probably is what brought them to your site in the first place (isn’t that the reason you ran the ad in the first place).
One of our most popular posts was where we scanned and posted a BMW motorcycle ad, and placed the copy in a Google friendly format (remember, search engines can’t read flash- or the text in the contents of a jpg file) – another was where we compared an Apple TV campaign to a Burger King TV spot- which brought us mad traffic for information on the BK spot. For all the creativity Crispin Porter Bogusky showed in the BK spot and the strategy, they made it hard for people to find out where “I am man, hear me roar” came from.
So instead of driving people to Burger Kings site, where they could have been rewarded with a special offer, or discovered additional information about the product- like the exact ingredients in a Texas Double Whopper- they were on our site.
One of the outcomes of the BMW ad- is that when people search for “BMW motorcycles in Dayton” they end up on our site- and are disappointed that we were mentioning that our market has lost it’s closest dealer- partially because BMW hasn’t been successful at driving traffic to the shops- in our opinion, because of lackluster advertising and a poor web strategy.
We are now getting a lot of traffic on our site for people searching out answers to marketing questions- so we’re starting a new category: Practical marketing 101. We will be writing about ways to build successful marketing plans- utilizing well built websites as a basis for formulating sales plans that generate high traffic- especially for smaller businesses- independent businesses and our favorite type of client- the underdog.
We hope this helps you understand what The Next Wave means when we say we aren’t just an “ad agency”- but a source for marketing and innovation.
What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 16, 2006 | Advertising, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns, Low Budget Advertising, Marketing & the Web, Search and Business, Web strategy
Think Tank 3 thinks they are brilliant. They bought ads on Google (the ones that show up on the right of a search) for key phrases for searches for other hot shops. Here is their site:
think tank 3 | a modern day think-shop
Note- no RSS feeds, pop-up windows- all the things that Google and blind people really don’t like.
If you look at how Google sees them by typing in site:thinktank3.com you will find they only have 51 results- many with the same headline. The OneShow thinks this idea of buying keywords was an innovative use of media- we say, it’s embarrasing. We can get to the top of search for free. The following is from their site- I can’t link to the exact page- because it’s a pop-up):
THINK TANK 3
This online campaign for and by Think Tank 3 is the first ever idea based campaign to run on Google, using Google’s ad-words program. Search marketing accounts for gazillions of dollars in online advertising and it had never been used to host an idea based campaign. That’s why our series of ads, which appear on Google when you type in searches like “Crispin Porter”, “Alex Bogusky”, “DDB”, “Modernista”, or “Kaplan Thaler,” stand out so much. It’s also the reason they were worthy of a One Show Merit Award for exceptional innovation in media.
We’ve gone from not showing up in search for Crispin Porter Bogusky to number 11 because we understand that content brings real results. Google AdWords is an expensive way to get people to your site. And once people get to your site- wouldn’t it be great if they could comment on it- or point to an exact part of it- so they can send it on to their friends. Sort of like what this site accomplishes? What do you think?
by Next Wave Team | Jul 14, 2006 | Advertising, Brand Relevancy, Creativity, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Everything You Want to Know About Advertising, Future of advertising, Great Ad Agencies, Guerrilla Campaigns
The Craziest Ad Guys In America
Business Week gives CP+B the title “The craziest ad guys in America”- when in fact, it’s the other agencies that are crazy. Corporate conglomerates have zero to do with creative solutions to business problems- they cause business problems.
When The Next Wave came into this world, we avoided the words “advertising” and “agency” for a reason- the solution isn’t always advertising (in fact, most of the time- it’s not advertising at all) and we’re not a temp agency to come in and solve your problems so that we can go on our way when the client thinks they have everything under control. We chose the words “marketing • innovation” because according to Peter Drucker- that’s all there is to business. Even our tagline sounds different than most agencies- “Create lust • Evoke trust”- that’s what it’s all about- but, maybe we should also add- “make buzz” - because as Alex Bogusky says “I like that they are talking about the work. If they aren’t talking, then your brand is dead.”
In the media multiverse, it’s impossible to stand out if you do work that doesn’t create an emotional response. CB+P is willing to risk alienating some customers in order to stimulate the core buyers. This is the absolute opposite of what the big corporate agencies are willing to do. They prefer to buy buzz- because they can mark it up- the problem is buzz can’t be bought anymore.
If there is one thing to be learned from Crispin’s work, it’s that every opportunity to open a discussion with the market is exploited- from bags and window decals, to rewriting employee manuals. Read the article from Business Week- and come back and share your observations about how they approach their clients’ challenges.
Thank you.
