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Posts Tagged ‘ads’

Kit Kat is successfully hijacking the World Cup

Posted Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Brand Republic 09-Jun-10,

Kit Kat is successfully hijacking this year’s Fifa World Cup in South Africa, despite not paying hundreds of thousands of pounds on sponsorship deals like rival Mars, according to the latest BR Video.
 

Following the launch of football-led TV campaigns by both Nestlé and Mars, both confectionery brands are starting to become associated with the World Cup.

But Mars, and AMV BBDO, will be disappointed to discover there was little resonance for its TV spot which resurrects John Barnes‘ rap in New Order’s ‘World In Motion’ song, some 20 years after its first airing.

The chocolate bar had better luck with Mars‘ new wrapper, featuring the England flag, which was mentioned by a number of people in our video.

However, out of the people who had seen both TV ads, Kit Kat was the clear favourite, with its ‘Cross your fingers’ concept described as “clever” and “more relevant”.

One person also preferred the unofficial Kit Kat ad because it was “very subtle”, he went on to add: “As soon as you see the red wrapper you know…  It stands out a lot more than Mars.”

There was better news for the official sports and beer sponsors Adidas and Budweiser, which were among the first names to spring to mind surrounding this year’s World Cup. Although they were joined by the likes of Nike, Foster’s and IPA, all of whom have no links with the event.

Last week, Mars and The Football Association confirmed they are considering legal action against Nestlé for a possible breach of sponsorship rules.

Mars, which last October announced a five-year partnership with The FA, is an official supplier to the England team.

The confectionery company is now in discussions with The FA about the possibility of initiating court action against Nestlé over its football-based ad campaign, ‘Fingers crossed’, created by JWT London.

They believe Nestlé is guilty of “passing off” an association with the England team, despite not being an official sponsor.

Four years ago, Mars undertook its own ambush marketing to coincide with the World Cup in Germany. It was not an official partner of the England team at the time.


Tories lead rivals in ad effectiveness stakes

Posted Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

BrandRepublic, 27-Apr-10, 08:52

The Conservative Party has achieved a higher level of consumer awareness of its marketing efforts than any of its political rivals, according to an exclusive Marketing poll.

When asked which party’s marketing they had seen most, 48% of the 2000 people surveyed identified the Tories. The party’s success in this area may be related to its £18m advertising war chest – the maximum allowed under election expenditure rules. It is a figure the other main parties have been unable to match.

The survey, carried out for Marketing in partnership with online market-research firm Toluna, found that 26% of respondents cited Labour‘s marketing as the most-seen. The  figure for the Liberal Democrats was just 18%.

Since the start of the year the Conservatives have run a series of high-profile outdoor ads, although one execution relating to the NHS was widely lampooned online amid speculation that the picture of party leader David Cameron had been airbrushed.

Almost a third of respondents (31%) said the marketing they had seen had inf­luenced the way they intended to vote, while more than seven out of 10 (72%) said they had seen general-election marketing over the past month.

The survey also found that marketing held more sway than the leaders’ debates. When asked whether the debates had a greater influence on their voting intentions than marketing, 47% of people said they did not, compared with 35% who said they did.


Newspapers: the future

Posted Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

The way out of the paywall debate is for newspapers to become the online authority on what to buy and what to do

guardian.co.uk, April 12th 2010

Take a look at Google‘s homepage and compare it with any newspaper’s homepage. One difference is striking: www.google.com, the most viewed media output on the planet, contains no ads. And, unlike the newspaper industry, Google doesn’t have any financial problems.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Google understood that blindly converting its users’ eyeballs into money is not enough. The key is to develop a revenue model that makes the most of its unique advantage online. That advantage is being an online search platform, and the system it has developed integrates perfectly into that, by displaying relevant text ads for each search. Newspapers, by contrast, have tried importing the old media‘s ad revenue model to the web – and failed.

Online display ads don’t have enough impact on users to be attractive for advertisers, and therefore don’t generate enough income for publishers to sustain the newsrooms. This problem worsens as the print news industry generates less and less income, while people’s attention shifts more and more online.

In their despair, newspapers are now trying to copy another income model from old media – subscriptions. News Corp and the New York Times, for example, are at different stages of erecting paywalls around their sites. But it is not clear if users will be ready to pay for online news they are used to getting free. And this strategy will clearly reduce newspapers’ visibility on the web, both on search engines and on social media – while cutting revenues from the ad model.

The solution is that, just like Google, newspapers should invent a revenue model that utilises their unique advantage on the web: their credibility. So how can they make money from trust? From a reader’s point of view, the first step before buying a product or a service is deciding what to buy. The best agents to answer such questions online should be newspaper websites, as they have both the knowledge and the credibility.

Newspapers should be the online authority on what to buy and what to do. Not only is this their duty in our age of information overload, it can easily be converted into revenue. The first step, then, is to anticipate the user’s quest. Reviewing “best cameras under £300” is a good example. So is comparing coffee makers or reviewing the movies on release now. The second step is to create the copy and the web page that provides answers to the reader’s question. The third and last step is to link to product or service providers. The newspaper generates revenue when the reader clicks on these links (if using the pay-per-click model) or when the deal is completed (if using the pay-per-action model).

In this system every actionable article (a book review, a travel guide) should have links to enable relevant action. By clicking on them, the reader turns into a potential customer. This may be a new model for newspapers, but it isn’t one on the web. Sites such as cnet.com (technology) or tripadvisor.com (travel) have been doing it for a while with great success.

While newspapers have at most £10-£20 average RPMs (revenue per 1,000 pageviews), these sites enjoy £25-£40 RPMs or higher. And the advertisers love them. As they are heavily optimised for search engines, they are among the first results users see when searching for products. So these “vertical” sites enjoy a significant number of visitors from search. The first result when typing “best laptop” on Google, for example, is laptopreviews.org.uk – which then leads the user to retailers’ sites stocking the products they recommend.

Indeed, this model creates perfect synergy with the search engines. The roles are clear: the newspaper creates the credible research or review, the search engine sends the visitors, a contextual advertising program matches relevant providers/advertisers to the content, and all parties share the revenue. Readers are exposed to the relevant text ads as they pass through the newspaper‘s credibility filter, and are ready to make a purchase.

When searching for “best laptop” on Google, no newspaper is present in the first few results pages. Newspapers have the reviews, the writers, the credibility, the potential to rank high on search results – but they are not there. Too bad, because that’s exactly where the money is.


Mercedes Campaign Focuses on Image, Not Recession

Posted Friday, June 19th, 2009

Car companies like Hyundai and Ford have been showing solidarity with consumers recently, running ads promising that the companies will help them should they lose their jobs.

The New York Times, June 18th 2009

Mercedes-Benz USA is trying a different way to get customers to buy cars as it introduces its updated E-Class Series. The ad campaign for the midsize car, available as a sedan or a coupe, is the company’s biggest in two years, estimated at $75 million. It does not talk about great value or good deals. Instead, it focuses on the cars‘ technology and heritage, a somewhat standard approach for the brand.

“Everyone has that trigger that’s going to get them out there in the marketplace again, assuming that they have the means and they’re just choosing not to spend it,” said Alex Gellert, the chief executive of Merkley & Partners, part of the Omnicom Group, which created the Mercedes print and television ads.

The E-Class update is meant to turn around an alarming sales slide for Mercedes, which is owned by Daimler. Its United States sales have declined 28.7 percent this year from the same time in 2008, according to the company. May sales were even further off, falling 33.4 percent from May 2008. The United States turned in the worst showing of any geographic region in May.

Even given the sales challenge, Steve Cannon, the vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz USA, decided not to echo the recession-conscious marketing that other car manufacturers have used. Hyundai promised to help customers pay for their cars if they lost their jobs, an offer Ford and General Motors soon matched. A recent spate of ads for Honda‘s Insight described it as “designed and priced for us all.”

“I’d rather tell our brand story, our innovation story, our value story, than join the chorus of everyone else that’s screaming ‘sale’ – that’s about the only message that’s out there right now,” Mr. Cannon said. “Customers have told us, ‘we know there are deals out there,’ so just getting on television with an expensive media plan and shouting, ‘there’s a sale,’ they already know that.”

Although Mercedes wanted to avoid emphasizing sale prices, it did place the starting price for the cars at the end of each television spot and in the print ads. At $48,600, it is almost 9 percent less than the starting price for the last set of E-Class cars, from the 2003 model year. The ads give just the price, though, not the discount. “For Mercedes-Benz customers, $48,600 is a huge value story, and those people know it, so I don’t have to go out and say, ‘value, value’ — that’s not appropriate for our brand,” Mr. Cannon said. “The folks that are looking for a midsize luxury sedan kind of understand the price points.”

For his customers, “I think there’s a level of crisis fatigue and recession fatigue out there, marketing down to, ‘we feel your pain. We’re all in this together,’ versus, ‘this is who we are,’ ” Mr. Cannon said. “All the things that mattered to them before the recession, it still matters to them. But we have to work harder to break through, because the system has been shocked significantly.”


 
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