hyperempowered

Best Marketing Campaign In Years: Cloverfield

So just how good was the buzz marketing campaign for "Cloverfield"?

The low-budget monster film, with no known actors and a first time director, debuted this weekend not only at #1 in the box office (grossing $41 million) but it also set the record for the best opening weekend in January, surpassing the $35.9 million premiere weekend of the "Star Wars" special edition in 1997. 

Click here for a full overview (from Movie Marketing Madness) of how the film was marketed.

Labor Strikes Go Digital: Lessons From The WGA

While it's still unclear how the Writers Guild strike will play out, what is clear is that the writers are extremely savvy using Web 2.0 technologies to market their position. The WGA has launched a full social media blitz, leveraging everything from Facebook, to blogs, to Twitter, to YouTube, to DIGG .

Among the things the Writers Guild have done are:

• Creating a channel on YouTube with daily interviews of writers and celebrities on the picket lines.
• Launching a blog, United Hollywood
• Establishing a Twitter channel to reach people on their blackberrys and mobile phones
• Launching an "Opinion Page" on The Huffington Post
• Using DIGG to raise the rankings on social media site of important articles stating their position
• Setting up numerous user supported groups on Facebook

As a marketing strategist, for me the Writers Guild strike has quickly become a best-of-breed case study in how to "market" a labor strike on the web.    

My Istanbul Speech Now On Google Video

Last week I flew over to Istanbul to give a presentation on the "social web" to attendees at WYSTC 2007, a conference on the student travel industry. The seminar was entitled "Next Generation Technology - Web 2 and Web 3 Platforms transforming commerce and marketing". The speech is now up on Google video.  Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

How Do You Market Failure?

Well, if you're smart like the Jelly Belly company, you repackage all those imperfect little jelly beans as "Belly Flops" and you position them as follows:

"The cute little misshapen beans that everyone loves are available right here. Belly Flops are lumpy, bumpy and a little odd looking, but their flavor is absolutely top notch."

It's a terrific example of "turning lemons into lemonade" and truly marketing "failure" in a way that helps the bottom line - all the while having a lot of fun.

Good stuff and a great lesson in creative branding.

(via Organic's Threeminds blog)

Misguided Marriages: AT&T and Pearl Jam

Ian Sohn takes the words right out of my mouth when he writes:

"I blame them all - AT&T should have never sponsored a Pearl Jam concert if they couldn't stomach the inevitable political commentary.  And what the heck does Pearl Jam need AT&T for at this point in their careers?"

For me, sponsorship only works when the sponsor and the brand share the same values and vision of the world.  Clearly AT&T and Pearl Jam don't have anything in common and should never have come together. 

For Marketers, Integrity Is No Longer An Option

Lynn Upshaw, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley, has penned a terrific article - "Integrity in Marketing Is Not Optional" - in this week's Advertising Age.   

He opens the piece by saying:

"While marketers grapple with the usual challenges -- competition, accountability, wrangling new technologies -- perhaps they should be more concerned with a far more powerful phenomenon: informed skepticism. In a world where buyers are continuously in touch with other buyers and claims are publicly deconstructed by anyone and everyone, marketers' toughest job may be to simply convince buyers that they speak the truth. In such a world, marketing integrity is not just a virtue; it is a driver of choice."

Upshaw points out that not only does integrity matter, but it can add to the bottom line:

"Last year, more than 75% of Opinion Research respondents said they preferred to buy from a company that operates ethically, even if they have to pay more."

So who's doing a good job?  Upshaw points to...

...Herman Miller furniture and offices systems, Kiehl's beauty care shops, the Infosys IT firm , Patagonia outdoor apparel, Johnson & Johnson health care, W.L. Gore industrial products,  and Trader Joe's grocery stores.

At electricArtists we talk about how today successful marketing strategies are those that can successfully enter an ecosystem that exists on the Internet where any one website is only one node in a much larger conversation and success comes from not only what you do online, but how it connects with everything else.   Clearly integrity is one of the best vehicles to successfully enter that ecosystem and connect.

Cold Beer Amnesty

The most effective marketing campaigns are usually the least complicated. 

Carling's "Cold Beer Amnesty" program, developed by my colleagues at Cake Media Group in London, is a great example of a simple idea that delivers amazing results.

The assignment: Get as many ice cold Carlings into the hands of as many people who are loyal to other brands, at a time and a place when they are most likely to switch.

While it's not brain surgery, Carling understands that (a) nothing tastes worse than a really warm beer on a really warm day. and (b) similarly, nothing tastes better than a really cold Carling on a really warm day.

So.... for the third year running, at many of this summer's music festivals in the UK, with the temperatures rising and the home brought beer getting warmer by the minute, festival goers can swap any warm beer they have for an ice cold can of Carling.

This last weekend Cake kicked off this year's "Cold Beer Amnesty" program at the Isle of Wight Festival. The results - over 10,000 people swapped more than 30 different brands of beer, cider and lager in exchange for over 40,000 cans of ice cold Carling.

Sicko Stories

To this day, the single thing that I find most powerful about the web is that it truly is a grassroots medium. 

While the world's newspapers and television stations are controlled by a very small and select group of media owners who act as gatekeepers, on the web everyone has the ability to be heard.   

What continues to excite me about the internet is that as it evolves, this fundamental truth - that all of us now have "access" to an audience - only gets stronger and more powerful. For the first time in history, every single person on the planet has a global platform in which to share his or her thoughts and opinions to the world.

Plain and simple, there are no gatekeepers on the internet. 

With this in mind, I think Michael Moore's approach for marketing and generating grassroots awareness and momentum for Sicko, his upcoming film on the health care system, is extremely smart.

On Wednesday Moore posted a very simple one minute video on YouTube in which he asks people to share their own personal stories about how the health care system has failed them. 

As of this morning, less than two days after it was posted,  Moore's video has received over 160,000 views. Seventeen video testimonials have now been posted by people from all over the country, with hundreds of others now watching them each and every day.

With Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore showed himself to be an absolute master of grassroots marketing. So  its no surprise that he also innately understands that at the end of the day, the internet is about the collective "us". He understands that the best way to get people talking is to bring them together and to encourage and empower them to share their voice with others by using the tools that are available to them.

For months we've been hearing about how brands are now leveraging "user generated content."  But in almost all instances, the results have been absolute crap.  The reason for this is that what people are being asked to generate content for is not something that they feel all that passionate about. 

At the end of the day, how passionate can we honestly expect people to get about a soft drink or a pizza?

Moore understands that our health, and our lack of proper care for it, is something that we do indeed feel passionate about.  To successfully market Sicko on the web, he knows that what he needs to do is to tap into this frustration and to connect with people's passion points. 

By developing a grassroots community on YouTube that is centered around the frustrations people have with our health care system, Moore is not only marketing his film but also tapping into the essence of what the internet does best -  allowing each and every one of us  to confirm to ourselves and to others that  we are indeed alive and that we have the ability and the right to be heard.

How do you know when your brand needs a makeover?

If your customer wants to to cover you up, you should know that you're in trouble.

And if you're in the charge card business, it looks like it's time for a makeover. 

That's the message I got from reading this week's Consumed column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in which Rob Walker profiles CreditCovers, a company that is making a business out of selling creative "skins" for credit cards. 

In the past, pulling out the Gold or Platinum Card to pay for a business lunch defined a certain level of status. You got the card not to make your purchases easier but rather, to define your social position to others.

But over time, obtaining a credit card has became less aspirational and more utilitarian, making the Gold and Platinum colors ubiquitous and lacking any real definition of social status.

With customization being one of today's most important consumer trends, it makes sense that as a society we've become less interested in group status and more interested in personalization and self expression. 

One wonders why MasterCard or VISA or American Express isn't offering personalized skins themselves. The US Postal Service now allows you to use your own photographs to mail a letter, so why shouldn't your credit card company encourage you to have a card with your favorite image on it? 

Perhaps it's only a matter of time.

Verdino and Stoller

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel discussing social media with both Greg Verdino from Digitas and Chad Stoller from Organic.  Both are incredibly smart and, not surprisingly, both are bloggers. 

You can read their words of wisdom here, here and here.