Snapping a 23-year streak on the gridiron, PepsiCo’s beverages will sit out Super Bowl XLIV, as the soft-drink and snack giant puts its advertising muscle behind a new cause-related marketing program. |
“In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event,” says Frank Cooper, senior vice president of PepsiCo Americas Beverages. However, Doritos, a PepsiCo snack brand, will advertise during the game broadcast. |
Pepsi’s break from the big game does carry a risk, branding experts say, because consumers have come to expect entertaining ads from the company. |
“It’s a bit of a gamble to walk away from such an iconic event that has been such a big and critical part of their marketing program,” says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Ill. “I think there could be a bit of backlash.” Read more at online.wsj.com |
If the mainstream media has a future, it is (hopefully!) going to look like this: |
Bloggers may be able to compete on intellect, price, and speed, but if the MSM can continue to compete on those levels as well as deliver content on rich media platforms like the one featured here, it points to a less-bleak-than-we-thought future. Read more at www.pr-squared.com |
One of the most notable flameouts of the new media era was Bud.TV. Launched in early 2007 with great fanfare, the site was an attempt by brewing giant Anheuser-Busch to capture the attention of young beer drinkers through non-traditional means. |
Marketing bloggers jumped all over Anheuser-Busch. With the benefit of hindsight, they pointed out that anyone could have predicted the failure of Bud.TV. But I’d argue that the concept was a sound one, and had the site launched in 2010 instead of 2007, it would have stood a much better chance of succeeding. |
Three years is an eternity in Internet time, and Bud.TV simply may have been too far ahead of the curve. Today, those same marketing bloggers are calling on companies to create their own online content channels to reach consumers who have tuned out the traditional media. |
| If a company can offer relevant content that its customers actually want to see, it can build loyalty as a welcome source, rather than as an uninvited intruderRead more at www.minnpost.com |
| I found myself having lunch next to a middle-aged man who told me that, when he was starting his business, he had moved all around the country until he arrived at what he considered the destination city of La Jolla, California — north of San Diego. |
He was frustrated because his son, who had grown up in that ritzy ZIP code, was now in his early 20s and considered it his birthright to keep living there. Shaking his head, the man said: “He doesn’t understand that I had to work my whole life to get here, and that he has to move to a more affordable city and work his way back.” |
| Multiply that story by 10 million, and you get a sense for what we’re up against. Here again, the native-born could learn from immigrants, foreign students, and anyone else who has the moxie to leave behind family, friends, and the familiar in search of a better life. Those people may struggle, but they’ll survive and get ahead. |
| The knock on direct-response is that it’s not really selling brands. Critics say the denizens of late-night and thinly rated cable programming sell one-offs and then move on to the next quick hit.
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But Scott Boilen, president of Allstar Marketing Group, is out to prove them wrong. Having surprised even himself when his blanket with sleeves broke through as a pop-culture hit earlier this year, Mr. Boilen now projects the Snuggie will be bigger still in year two. |
He’s pulling out the same stops more-esteemed marketers of such blue-chip brands as Tide or Cheerios have long used, including a bevy of line extensions. |
| “You always need a combination of luck and a well-timed strategy,” Mr. Boilen said. “Snuggie took off with viral campaigns that were not part of us. Once we started seeing that, our whole marketing team got behind it.”
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How many times might each Glove Love owner tell the story of their mismatched gloves? 5, 10, 20 times? If only big brands thought about story-telling this way. How do they, beyond their brand history or product benefits, create stories that their users would want to share with their friends? What might those stories be? |
| First off, as a sustainability-based non-profit trying to “inspire people to lead a greener life”, they definitely take a new approach to the “reuse” portion of recycle, reduce, reuse. And, they do so in a novel way, which creates an engaging story for audiences. This story is supported on the web with social media |
Secondly, this appeals to another consumer desire, the desire for truly unique products with their own story. To facilitate this, Glove Love actually asks people to name the gloves they donate as well as describe where exactly the lonely single was saved. That way, each pair has a story of their own. Each pair is truly one-of-a-kind. Read more at www.shopperculture.com |
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