Here’s how you make a viral video. One thing I’ve noticed about viral videos, is that they’re earnest. They’re not overproduced. And they rarely give you the sense that the creators really thought that they should make this in order to go viral.
I also really liked the last 45 seconds or so. After watching the video, they make a plea for a small donation to their favourite charity. Having watched the video, don’t you feel like you owe them?
When Tim Horton’s recently announced that they’d be adding espresso to their lineup in a bid to take on Starbucks, I had to check the date to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.
This move is so stunningly ignorant of the brand, I question who is in charge at Tim Horton’s, and how disconnected are they from their customers. Tim Horton’s is defined as much by what it is, as what it isn’t. Tim Horton’s isn’t Starbucks. The two tribes couldn’t be further apart, or more clearly defined. So this move to capture some of the Starbucks audience is particularly puzzling. Nevermind that espresso doesn’t fit into the Tim Horton’s brand of simple, Canadian comfort food.
This is where Tim Horton’s jumps the shark. I eagerly await their next brand extension, but I’m not sure how they can get further from their audience and brand than this. Maybe sushi?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw7uhVtpI5I
Here’s a really entertaining music video from Method Man and Sour Patch Kids. It’s kind of surprising to see a member of Wu-Tang hocking candy, though rap is no stranger to paid product placement.
I can only imagine that this is an attempt from Sour Patch Kids to do some “viral” marketing (I wonder how that meeting went). While I’m not sure about how viral it actually is (it isn’t), and I don’t know how the video contributes to the brand perception (do these candies need more street-cred?), I give them credit for getting a credible artist, and not some hip-pop “star”.
I really liked this billboard, mostly because of how well it speaks to the audience: it’s a polarizing message that delivers their brand promise. Perhaps what’s so novel about this ad is how rare something like this is. The restaurant has one location, so the ad budget can’t be immense. But often similar restaurants flounder in their attempts at advertising, missing their audience completely. While I often point to a meagre budget to explain their failures, this ad shows that a bit of strong copy can do wonders.
At one point on stage at the 2010 Brand New Conference, organizer and blogger Armin Vit joked, “Did you know there’s an arrow hidden in the Fedex logo?” It’s something that brand identity professionals take for granted, but is surprisingly little-known out of the industry. But once you’ve seen it, it doesn’t leave you.
I was really impressed to see the company’s commitment to this famous detail in their logo. Have a look at the arabic translation of the logo, it still contains the detail of the arrow created out of the negative space. Even better, it maintains consistency with the “regular” logo insofar as the arrow points in the direction that you read. Attention to detail always pays off.
Cornell University recently published a paper about daily deal sites, and the negative effects they have on your brand. The key takeaways:
Lots of people talk about your brand, but on average they think less of you than before you ran the offer. And for the privilege, you give up 75% of your revenue!
The whole thing is available at Cornell. But here’s a good summary:
Daily deal sites have become the latest Internet sensation, providing discounted offers to customers for restaurants, ticketed events, services, and other items. We begin by undertaking a study of the economics of daily deals on the web, based on a dataset we compiled by monitoring Groupon and LivingSocial sales in 20 large cities over several months. We use this dataset to characterize deal purchases; glean insights about operational strategies of these firms; and evaluate customers’ sensitivity to factors such as price, deal scheduling, and limited inventory. We then marry our daily deals dataset with additional datasets we compiled from Facebook and Yelp users to study the interplay between social networks and daily deal sites. First, by studying user activity on Facebook while a deal is running, we provide evidence that daily deal sites benefit from significant word-of-mouth effects during sales events, consistent with results predicted by cascade models. Second, we consider the effects of daily deals on the longer-term reputation of merchants, based on their Yelp reviews before and after they run a daily deal. Our analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases significantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are 10% lower than scores of their peers on average.
I am pretty biased against coupon sites. My wife subscribes to all of them, which is cool. But I don’t like them from an advertiser’s point of view.
My wife bought a deal from a site a few weeks ago. She was pretty excited when she told me about it, and we shook our heads in wonder, “How can that business afford to do this?” Then she got this email:
——– Original Message ——–
From: [email protected]
Subject: [Auto-Reply] Cupcakes
Date: 14 Oct 2011 12:01:29 -0700Thank you for your interest in Little Miss CupCake
Unfortunately because of the issue we experienced with dealfind.com we are not accepting ANY orders for the time being, and we will not be accepting any of the Dealfind vouchers purchased.
We apologize for the inconvenience.DEALFIND ISSUE
Dealfind oversold passed what I had asked them to,
and then would not turn off the deal when asked to do so.
To top that off, they refused to answer my calls and emails as the deal was going on.They added free delivery to the deal, which was not the case.
I had told them there was no free delivery allowed.
I gave them rates and delivery restrictions, which they refused to put in my ad.
They also stated that the vouchers could be redeemed all at once,
which is not something I agreed to.I do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you,
and I encourage you to ask for a refund (Dealfind.com will issue full refunds within 30 days of purchase, I personally cannot issue refunds, as Dealfind has all of the funds)
This is just an awkward mess. How much of this is true, I don’t know. But it looks like a ridiculous offer went out and sold like crazy. The advertiser claims that Dealfind basically just invented the whole offer against his wishes, then disappeared on the day it went out. Now customers are left to sort out the mess with Dealfind, as the bakery has enough to worry about, trying to repair it’s brand from this mess.
I don’t like these sites primarily because the math doesn’t work out very well. Advertisers have to offer steep discounts (roughly 50% off), and then they only get 50% of the proceeds from the deal. So you’re only getting about 25% of the regular price for your product/brand.
Then think about the type of clients this brings the brand: either existing customers already familiar with your brand and just picking up a good deal; or new customers that are often unfaithful to your brand as they seek out new deals from your competition. Now you realize you’ve just paid 75% for a pretty unattractive customer. Can your margins bear 1000 of these customers?
Tomorrow I’ll get into some research done about these sites, and the actual effects these offers have on your brand.
I was in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets from the time I was twelve until I turned nineteen. Remembrance Day, and the poppy, have special meaning for me. I would spend every Saturday before Remembrance Day selling poppies in my pressed uniform, outside major shopping centres, grocery stores, and big box retailers; typically in sub-freezing temperatures. We would spend hours and hours there, in the cold, with a box of poppies around our necks. I don’t think it’s done anymore, but it’s something that has had a profound impact on how I think about the poppy.
On Remembrance Day we would participate in one of the many ceremonies conducted by the Royal Canadian Legion. And when I say participate, I don’t mean that we were in the stands. No, we were on the parade ground with the members of the Canadian Armed Forces, and members of the veterans soceity. Afterwards we would help clean up the hockey rink, before heading back to the Legion for a wrap up.
I can remember feeling frustrated that more people didn’t seem to take much notice of the day. For most people it means about as much as Victoria Day (May long weekend): it’s just a day off of work.
I think Remembrance Day is a difficult day for many advertisers. Most holidays celebrate a part of our lives. It’s a pretty straightforward task to craft messaging to spur spending–prefferably on your brand. But Remembrance Day is supposed to be a pretty solemn day. So while advertisers have a large populace with a day off of work, and nothing to do; they can’t co-opt the day for rampant consumerism, which would cause numerous PR problems.
Paradoxically, it’s usually advertisers that shape and define much of our holidays through their command of the media. Remembrance Day remains an amorphous holiday for most Canadians, it does so largely because advertiser’s inability to commercialize the day.
I really enjoy ads that embrace the constraints of their media or environment. Here are four examples that caught my eye.
In an effort to get more pro golfers driving BMW, these graphics were installed in the hotel bathrooms of the pro golfers at a tournament in Illinois. If you accepted the invite you got to drive BMW cars on a closed track with tutelage from a couple of pro drivers.
