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Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
Advertising’s Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl is more important than ever for mass marketers. Could Super Bowl ads become part of a shift to a society that STANDs FOR LESS wasteful consumption?
February 4 update: Listen to our Chief Creative Officer Tom Ortega discuss this year’s ads with Dennis Lambert on Arizona’s largest NPR station, KJZZ.
American media habits have changed substantially. The media we consume is more fractured and the ways we get information and entertainment continues to evolve rapidly. Large events, with the Super Bowl at the top of the list, provide marketers an increasingly rare opportunity to communicate with a mass audience.
The creativity that goes into Super Bowl ads is part of the annual Super Bowl conversation and we are among those who watch closely to see the latest work from our industry.
Social media channels provide marketers new challenges and opportunities to give Super Bowl ads life beyond game time. This is the new wild west of the marketing world.
Read more about this year’s trends and analysis of the most noteworthy campaigns at:
Advertising Age’s Super Bowl coverage and Adweek’s “Super Commercials.”
In some regards the Super Bowl is an example of the pinnacle of our consumer culture. At RIESTER we believe that it’s vital for the sustainability of our way of life to change how and what we consume. Read more about this at the STAND FOR LESS website, one of the campaigns we are especially proud of.
Don’t miss Tom’s interview on KJZZ.
RIESTER interviews JB Hester, professor of advertising at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
I met Professor Hester on Twitter. We spoke recently about some of the new tools of our trade.
Advertising Professor JB Hester.
Breitinger: Can you to define the term social media?
Hester: I don’t like the term. I think that’s from being in advertising, when I think of media I think of things very differently. The term “media,” a real strict definition of it that we learned way back in school is: a carrier or deliverer of information, entertainment, and advertising. These tools that we’re talking about, like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, they’re more than that. They’re not just a channel and what people do with them is more than just one-way communication. And so, the term media just doesn’t seem to capture the essence of what is going on here. I like “social networking,” that’s kind of my favorite term for all this.
What are some of your favorite advertising and marketing blogs?
I was reading RIESTER’s earlier and I will give you guys credit, your blog is very nice. The thing that I like, is getting a good idea of who the people are at your agency. I told somebody earlier that I was going to do this phone call and that I probably know more about you than I do a lot of the people in the advertising industry in this area. Just because I’ve seen so much stuff on Twitter and I’ve read your blog.
I like that you’re creative. I get the impression that the people who work there are very much into their clients. Let me see if I can express that a little more clearly: When I was first getting started in advertising I was a big David Ogilvy fan. And one of the things that Ogilvy stressed was use your client’s products. And he wanted people who were passionate about those clients and I get that feeling from your agency.
Can you talk about organizations or brands tweeting?
This is one of those real interesting areas because Twitter wasn’t designed so that brands could use it. That wasn’t the purpose when it was developed. So it’s interesting to look at how brands have used it and some of them do better than others obviously and they do it in different ways.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of America's finest universities. This is the Old Well.
We have a former student named Alexa Robinson and she handles the Twitter account for Pizza Hut and she’s really fun to talk to because she tells stories about how she first started. The lawyers for Pizza Hut wanted to look at every single tweet before it went out. You’re thinking ‘okay, this doesn’t work that way.’
You’ve got a lot of different things going on here. Some brands are really flying by the seat of their pants. Actually I should re-phrase that—I think almost all of them are. Because this kind of stuff is so new, that we don’t necessarily know exactly the best way to do everything.
There are some brands that treat social networking tools as though they were just another broadcast channel. That’s probably not the best use, but it is a way to use them. I hate when I read those articles by self-proclaimed experts that you have to do this or you cannot do this in these various platforms because you know if a company gets information out by using Twitter purely as a broadcast channel and it gets to who they want it to get to, good for them! That’s fine. That’s one way to use it.
There are interesting things that happen because social networking platforms are so very different from the traditional things we’ve been using.
What are some advantages for you for in using Twitter?
The most obvious advantage for me is that it’s a great way for me to connect to the industry. You can get isolated in the university if you’re not careful especially if you’re in a professional program where you’re teaching advertising, you have to be careful that you don’t do that. It does help me there. It helps with a lot with my students. I’ve got a class of 92 people this semester and I bet you that 80 of them were already on Twitter when they came to class yesterday. Students in that young demographic have discovered Twitter.
We met JB Hester on Twitter.
Traditional broadcast media channels aren’t getting the market share that they once did. What trends do you talk about with your students regarding broadcast media advertising and also how important is that as part of the mix these days?
It’s still really important if you’re looking for a big audience. Joseph Jaffe wrote that book a few years ago about the death of the 30-second spot. Well I’m sorry Joseph but the 30-second spot is not dead yet. It still works and it actually can work really well. It’s not that social media is replacing traditional media, it’s just yet another tool and we spend actually in our curriculum we spend a lot of time talking about all of the various options that you have. TV is still a big part of it. The thing that happens now of course is you do TV, and then you’ve got a version of that that goes on YouTube and you hope you go viral.
Do you talk about the characteristics of something going viral in the classroom?
We do. You have to actually be careful because getting something to go viral is very hard. You don’t want to have a bunch of students working on a project and have every one of them saying “And we’re going to do this thing and it’s going to go viral.” Because that’s not the way it works necessarily. So we talk a lot about how difficult it is. It’s like everything else in advertising—to do it really well is really difficult.
Why does a particular ad catch the imagination of people and become part of popular culture? It’s very hard to sit down and quantify and say it’s x, y and z and that’s how we can reproduce and do it again. I think that if you have really good creative people who are really tuned into the world you’ve got a good shot.
What are some common misconceptions you see regarding social networking platforms?
Especially since I deal with students primarily and I have to be careful here because I’m not trying to say that students don’t know as much but they haven’t thought through things from a business standpoint. Having a Twitter account and having a Facebook page, great. But what are you going to with it? It’s the strategy behind it and I think that’s the biggest misconception that people have. The other misconception is that it’s free. It’s not going to cost anything to do this. Sure it doesn’t cost anything to open up an account but somebody’s got to do all the tweeting. But back to the strategy point, if you’re a business anything you do should be strategic. You should have a goal in mind. You’re trying to increase sales or increase foot-traffic or whatever it is. You set out a way to do that and all these tools are things that you can use that relate to various strategic goals that the company has. I think the biggest misconception is “Well we have a Facebook page, so why aren’t people coming in the door?”
Please expand on that a little bit? Say you’re speaking at a conference to business people, how would you describe for them the characteristics they should look for in who they hire to do their social networking?
You just get an intern, didn’t you know? Sorry that’s kind of the joke these days. I think a lot of it’s going to depend on what you’re trying to do. If I’m going to use Twitter to pump out discount codes where today only if they come in and mention this they’ll get 20% off that’s a totally different thing than if you’re trying to build a relationship with key customers versus if you’re trying to get foot-traffic versus if you’re trying to build followers. There’s all these things. If I were giving a speech to business people, my question is not what you can do on Twitter or Facebook or insert social media here, but why should you use it to begin with?
Professor Hester likes Doritos. He discusses one way this brand is using its social networking tools to interact with customers.
A lot of businesses probably could do a lot more with it but you’ve got to figure out what the heck you’re trying to do with it and go from there. In terms of hiring people, obviously you need people who understand the various tools. But it’s like hiring someone to make ads, if you’re hiring an art director to do magazine ads obviously they need to know a lot about typography and color and all those wonderful things about production but they also need to understand advertising. They need to understand what gets a reaction from people. How you can combine a headline and a visual to sell a product. So it’s the same issue now. It’s really not that different. It’s just different sets of skills.
What about Facebook? How do you see that fitting into the world of marketing?
Facebook is fascinating because there’s so much information that can be used to target in Facebook. If you want only men, only in a specific age group, only in a specific part of the country, who only have expressed an interest in underwater skydiving or whatever. Facebook has got all of that information and can do that for you. And so you can get incredibly targeted things.
When I go on my Facebook account which I do at least a couple times a day, it’s real fascinating to look at what ads I’m being served and to see if they relate to what Facebook knows about me and most of the time they really do. Probably the two big Internet success stories advertising-wise are Facebook and Google ads because in both instances you’ve got a situation where it’s highly, highly targeted.
What about a Facebook page?
A Facebook page is a little different story. And I actually picked Doritos because of some interaction I had with them on Twitter. Because I’m a big fan of the Habanero Doritos and they were taken off the market and I learned through their Twitter feed that the flavor was coming back. So that made me go to the Facebook Doritos page and become a fan there and sure enough they brought back that flavor even though I still can’t get it. But in terms of an ad on Facebook for a lot of companies that’s not really going got drive sales or anything. But for others it may be very, very good.
That’s a good example of interacting with a brand. You don’t usually have that opportunity, at least not very easily.
Right. It’s also a good example because I think most people would say “Why on Earth would you want to interact with Doritos?” That’s a lot different than other types of brands. But that’s my favorite flavor.
Returning to the more common and broader term, there’s a lot of hype about “social media.” What’s on-mark, what’s off-mark, what’s the potential?
I think you can probably just look at history. Every new channel or medium to come along that can be used for advertising has been hyped as the best and going to totally get rid of what came before, etc. etc. And that never really happens. Other channels and other media adapt. TV did not kill radio. Even reports of the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated. I think there is a lot of promise in social media.
Thanks professor! You can follow Joe Bob Hester on Twitter @joebobhester.
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A Mad Man is Born.
Skip is second from the right, with his ABC colleagues in 1963.
In the late summer of 1963, a young man named Skip Branch set off from Salt Lake City for Los Angeles with his wife. The couple temporarily left their one year-old toddler at home in Utah with his grandparents as Mom and Dad set off for the big city to pursue a new life. Skip was putting himself on a path that would land him squarely into the world of TV’s Mad Men.
At 21 years old, Skip was only a few years younger than the fictional advertising executives and creative staff of the hit AMC show. He had no job lined up, not even any interviews — just a notion that he would become a writer or an actor. Somebody mentioned advertising to him as a possible career so his job search expanded in that direction.
In a month, Skip landed a job with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network working in advertising sales. His starting salary was $400 per month. The family moved in to a basement apartment next to the freeway and they barely had enough money for food.
Skip Branch had arrived on the ground floor of an industry at a time in America that Skip says is faithfully captured by Mad Men’s creator Mathew Weiner. His office was at Hollywood and Vine. The famous Hollywood Brown Derby–a place where deals were made–was around the corner. Brooks Brothers suits were the uniform of the day. Skip had arrived.
His first day at work played out like a scene from Mad Men. “Two of the guys I worked with took me to lunch. When we arrived, the waitress already knew what they were drinking: a vodka gimlet and a vodka martini on the rocks. I ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. Before we ordered our food we had to have a second round. One of the guys was on to his third drink by the time our food arrived. By then my cheeks were getting numb and I think I was slurring my speech, so I stopped there. Back at the office I had a cup of coffee and went in to the bathroom and slapped my cheeks so I could face the rest of the day. By the time I drove home I had a hangover. All of this on my first day on the job!”
When asked if he continued to drink after that initial lunch, he didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely. I loved it. I drank vodka martinis on the rocks the whole time I was at ABC.
On Mad Men there is hardly a scene without someone dragging on a cigarette. Skip confirmed that this was indeed the way it was. Offices were filled with ash trays and “98% of the people smoked.” Skip began smoking when he was 16. “It was considered a rite of passage at the private school I attended. I continued smoking until 1966. At that time I was skiing with a friend at Mammoth Mountain. He told me he was going to quit smoking that weekend and I decided I should too. Cigarettes gave me headaches and I knew they weren’t good for me. While people generally knew smoking was bad for them by this time, not very many people were quitting yet. Back at the office I had to explain to people that I didn’t smoke anymore and to some extent I was the odd man out. This remained the case well into the 1970s.”
“Honey,” “sweetheart,” “cutie,” these are the nicknames of the professional women of Mad Men. Skip confirms that this was the norm of the day. From his perspective it wasn’t derogatory, it was just the way things were. The secretarial pool was where most women in the workplace could be found but there were exceptions.
As a 21 year-old starting out at ABC, Skip had his own secretary and it was a 33 year-old man. “This was very unusual.” Skip’s second secretary was a woman and somewhat like Mad Men’s Peggy Olson. “My new secretary was very good and was eager for the job. She would do anything to break in to the advertising business and this was her chance.”
In the 1960s there were “a few women who were executives and they were treated like executives. I didn’t notice that they had less power than a guy. One thing I did know, however, and it’s something that everyone, especially women, knew, is that a woman always made less than a man. This was just accepted and I never heard anyone complain about it (although they may have privately).”
During his ABC years he was sent on a sales trip to San Francisco to meet an advertiser who was “an old broad in the business—that was the term people used at the time.” He was told to be prepared to match her drink for drink when they met as well as the admonition that no matter how she looks and acts, she remembers everything. (For Mad Men fans, imagine someone like season two’s character Bobbie Barrett, but 15 years older, at least 10 pounds lighter after years of rough living, and still very much in the game.) At the lunch they started putting down the martinis. Skip began to slow down his consumption while she steamed ahead. “She began to totter in her seat, and her face finally made contact with her plate. She sat back up and had a piece of lettuce on her forehead that stayed there for the rest of our meeting. Luckily it got knocked off as she stood up to leave.”
Skip says that the feel of Mad Men and the way that the show portrays the social mores of that era are “spot on.” “I’m as much impressed with the set design, styling and wardrobe as anything else. The smoking looks overdone but it was that bad – enough to make you choke.”
In late 1966 Skip Branch returned to Salt Lake City. At the time ABC offered him a promotion with a good salary to take a job in New York. It was a great opportunity, but he missed the mountains and Alta, his favorite ski area. He was ready to return home. His first job in Salt Lake was as a copywriter. He quickly moved on to become an advertising sales manager at a Salt Lake City television station. In the early 1970s Skip opened his own advertising agency and has been on that side of the business ever since.
In the fourth season of Mad Men the show jumps forward a year from where it left off. The fictional agency from the first three seasons split apart and the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, just got divorced. With a new agency and a new life as a single man in New York this season opened with Don struggling to find his footing.
In 1963 a young Skip Branch found his footing with a start on the media side of the ad business. He had more children and his career flourished. The ABC experience was treated like an elite MBA when he returned to Utah. Skip remains actively engaged in the ad industry as a senior partner at RIESTER, a regional advertising agency with offices in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. To many of us the early sixties seem very far away. For Skip Branch, it was when he came of age and launched his career as a Mad Man.
2010 Addy Awards: RIESTER lands Special Judges Award, plus a pile of gold.
At this year’s Addy Awards, RIESTER walked away with 14 awards, including the coveted Special Judges Award for its American Lung Association Climb Phoenix campaign. The campaign also resulted in a Gold Addy for the Climb’s t-shirt and a Silver for the poster.
RIESTER’s newest campaign for the Arizona Bureau of Tobacco Education & Prevention received its share of recognition. Individual Gold Addys were awarded to all three television commercials and the website, venomocity.com. Addict-A-Friend, the campaign’s texting effort, won Silver. And the entire campaign won another Gold.
A Bronze Addy was awarded to RIESTER for its Arizona Lottery television commercial “Hiding.”
STAND FOR LESS, the nation’s first integrated sustainability campaign for a major city, won Silver. This included the website, standforless.com, and four television commercials.
RIESTER also won 2010 Addy Awards for: The “Buffalo Bill’d Yourself” microsite for the Park County Travel Council in Wyoming; the Alta Ski Area “History” print ad; as well as Pixels Foto & Frame Point-Of-Sale.
Things I am thinking about on punctuation day.
As an advertising writer, I realize not everyone considers me a writer in the traditional sense, like one would a journalist or novelist. My best friend’s mom, who considered my free-spiritedness a bad influence on her CPA son, once asked me what I did.
“I’m a writer,” I said.
“Well, what kind of writing do you do?” she asked.
“Ads, mainly,” I said.
“Oh, so you’re not a real writer.”
Ouch. Although, now that I think about it, not being a real writer would explain a few things, including why I’ve never given much thought to the actual tools of my trade—punctuation marks.
Of course, I use punctuation marks. But I certainly don’t brandish them the way a chef would her tongs, or tuck them confidently in a belt loop like a carpenter would a hammer. But just because I don’t regularly sing the praises of apostrophes and parentheses doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of it, particularly on their own special, albeit subdued, holiday. So to help you celebrate, I now give you a few things I’ll be thinking about on National Punctuation Day.
Why exactly do we call them punctuation marks and question marks? Why not punctuation steves, or question kathys?
Speaking of names, whoever named punctuation marks owes a sincere apology to the colon. Seriously, how do two little vertical dots get stuck sharing a name with the most disgusting organ in the human body? Did it lose a bet? Did it trash talk about being twice the period too much? Or did the punctuation guy just have a bad burrito before this one?
I need to know this stuff.
As much as the colon has reason to complain, though, it doesn’t compare to the semi-colon. If you think it’s lousy being called something that’s totally full of you-know-what, imagine being called something that’s only half full of it.
Now the ellipsis, whoo boy. It sounds cool and looks cool. Using one is pretty fun, too. It’s like the writer is saying, “You know what, I don’t want you to just read pause, I want to force you to pause by making your eyes stumble through three periods in a row.” Awesome. Of course, the Chinese really do it right. Their ellipses have six dots. That’s not just power, that’s honor—like holding your bow a little longer than everyone else.
Now maybe you’re sitting there thinking, “You know, Troy, that’s great, but I just don’t care about punctuation all that much.” And that’s fine. After all, what do I know? I’m not even a real writer. But go ahead and wish someone Happy Punctuation Day anyway! And I mean that…with an exclamation point.
