Digital Hive

Customer Insight Might Have Helped

Bowing to consumer pressure, Snickers has pulled the "Afterthekiss" website and commercial, and according to the Fon du Lac Reporter "Apologizes to gays" (I guess I will have to wait for my apology.) Yeah, um, Fon du Lac Reporter - it was annoying, if not downright offensive, no matter your sexual orientation.

I don't understand how Snickers got into this mess. Why would TBWA Chiat/Day position them like that? The Super Bowl is a huge deal. It's expensive, there is tons of press attention, lots of people just watching the commercials and only tolerating the football content crammed between ads, and it's the Super Bowl. So did Snickers roll out this concept with no customer insight? Have they identified their prime product consumer as a Neanderthal with a brain injury? How could they be so far removed from their product?

And why did the NFL "play ball" with the concept? If you visited the site before they took it down, you could view NFL players watching the commercial (and grimacing and making comments that will come back to haunt them) and three alternate, but equally horrific endings.

Adrants had an interesting opinion on the effectiveness of the ad, and what the negative long-term impact of the awful manliness concept may be. An insightful quote from the Adrants article:

Somewhere along the line, this industry forgot that Super Bowl ads still need to accomplish what advertising is meant to do: sell. It's perfectly fine for advertising to go for the laugh, the tear, the shudder but it still has to sell or else it's all a pointless waste of money. It's too bad that many in the industry creating ads have forgotten that and have put too much effort into the creation of entertainment at the expense of advertising primary function: to aid in the movement of product from manufacturer to consumer.

And here I thought the Super Bowl was turning into the U.S. National 60 Second Film Festival.

A final thought, which a friend mentioned the next day at work, and someone else posted as a comment on the Adrants post: "Had this ad featured two women, we'd all be drooling over it and loving it. The double standard lives on."

Ode to Trapper John

I’ve been recently working on outlining the tone that should be used for the development of creative for one of our clients. To help give me guidance a coworker said, “Describe the brand as if it was a person.” Immediately I thought of Trapper John – the “voice” of Moosejaw.

Moosejaw, a relatively small outdoor gear and apparel retailer based in Ann Arbor, MI has several stores throughout the Midwest. Even given is size, Moosejaw has one of the biggest followings of brand evangelists I’ve ever seen. I would even to go as far as to use the term “groupies”.

While the products they offer – North Face, Burton, Merrell - could be found on numerous other websites or stores the loyalty to Moosejaw is unwavering. This loyalty can be largely attributed to the “voice” of the brand. Their consistent brand personality is so well executed it seems as though it was a forethought to the building of the brand.

Trapper John is that voice. He’s a single guy (as of recently) who started the company with his family. He’s down on his luck with girls and is always running into awkward situations in life. He has a witty, tongue-in-cheek, unpretentious humor that he filters throughout the website, emails, catalogue, and his MySpace page (which has 4572 friends, but “We want 10,327”).

I don’t miss an email from Moosejaw – in fact I save them – but let’s keep that our little secret. While the emails, of course, feature products they also contain stories about Trapper John’s dating and personal life and the Moosejaw office stories.

You can’t help but love Trapper John and in turn love Moosejaw. His voice is consistently present in every consumer touch point – bringing the brand to life and making it feel much more personal.

I recommend you explore their website for examples of how Moosejaw integrates a consistent brand voice into everything they do. For a good read: click here to read the story behind the brand.

Laughing With or Laughing At?

Consumer generated content...ah, it's finally an era of we media, right? The customer is in control? They now have a voice?

A report on NPR this morning got me thinking, when is the consumer being used and when are they being celebrated? And is it OK for brands, media companies, etc to use/abuse them, as long as they're complicit in it?

NPR reported on the recent decision by the San Francisco Chronicle to begin podcasting some of the comments and feedback they receive from readers. The material is neatly packaged under the title " Correct Me If I'm Wrong". Seems harmless enough, and it indicates that perhaps the Chronicle will embrace opportunities to "stand corrected". But a recent comment they received from one particularly vitriolic reader was broadcast not because it offered a valid opinion (in their minds), but rather because the staff at the Chronicle seemed to be interested in letting the world laugh at this pedantic, overzealous reader-as-editor. The reader's message was in fact SO popular, that someone even made a Youtube video out of it - which the paper was kind enough to include on their site.

Does it feel to anyone else like they're getting a lot of mileage out of some poor guy's diatribe? Sure, sure, I know as a Planner that I'm a customer evangelist, but I don't think the caller deserves to be made a fool of because he offered feedback, especially when he was unaware that it would become fodder for a new podcast. And why is it that when a media outlet coopts the customer's voice the coverage is positive....could a brand every get away with it?

Final Remarks on Bad Marketing

Device location was factor in reaction. A headline from the Boston Globe on its Boston.com site.  A few choice comments:

In six of the nine other cities where the Turner Broadcasting System guerrilla ads were installed, they were not placed on or near major highways, bridges, or transit hubs, as they were in Boston.

"A device affixed to a support beam for a highway adjacent to a very busy subway and bus hub for the T?" asked T general manager Daniel A. Grabauskas. "And then in short order we hear about something under the Longfellow Bridge, the main arterial link between Cambridge and Boston over which the Red Line runs? Any suspicious activity around those locations would raise attention."

Turner is going to cover the costs - they will get through this with very little damage.  Interference Inc. has finally fessed up and hired a PR firm.  The phrase Generation Gap is back in vogue.  I'm totally over this story.  Stupid is as stupid does, can anyone show me some smart marketing examples?

Artist Told Keep Quiet During Panic

Ad Agency Told Artist to Stay Mum During Panic.  That was a Boston Globe headline on the Boston.com site this evening. The smirking clowns to the left are the "artists" known as Sean Stevens, 28 and Peter Berdovsky, 27 - today known as being responsible for at least some of the Cartoon Network advertising devices that caused emergency response overload in Boston on Wednesday.  Now yesterday I was hoping that Turner Broadcasting and their ad agency was not responsible for pointing out the devices to increase the hype - but today we learn the moronic agency that loosed the panic squad didn't bother to contact the police until 4:30pm. That's only eight and half hours from when the first device was found and shut down a major highway and subway line.  Reaction to the arraignment has been mixed, many people don't believe these men should be prosecuted for anything, many believing the ad agency should be prosecuted. The blogger and community board discussions have been very interesting (scary-interesting) to read.

While I don't believe these two should be on the hook for the tab owed to the City of Boston, they do need a smack upside their silly little faces if that was their reaction in court.  If the quote below is to be believed, Interference Marketing as agent for Turner Broadcasting's Cartoon Network should reimburse the City of Boston for yesterday's costs. A quote from this evening's article:

An advertising executive at Interference Marketing Inc. instructed Peter Berdovsky to keep quiet while police scrambled across the metropolitan area responding to a series of bomb scares. Berdovsky sent an e-mail to friends at 1:25 p.m. telling them not to talk about the marketing scheme to promote the animated television show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" on the Cartoon Network.

"My boss from the Cartoon Network’s ad agency just called -- she is asking that we pretty please keep everything on the DL," or down low, wrote Berdovsky, according to a copy of the e-mail provided to the Globe.

Cartoon Network, in its favor, posted an apology on the Adult Swim website.  We'll see where the day takes us tomorrow.