Loomis Group Blog

Samsung’s blazing entry into the Solid State Drive (SSD) market led with a creative public relations effort aimed at building momentum and credibility among both media influencers and everyday consumers.

The Samsung Experience: More than a press conference, a tipping point for broad exposure.

Over the past 2 years, the goal of the PR campaign has been to create affinity for Samsung’s consumer SSDs, going beyond speeds and feeds to drive purchase among the mainstream. That’s why we brought our creative game to a recent press conference introducing the latest product lineup.

More than a press conference, the Samsung Experience event became a tipping point for broad exposure with the help of a few key strategies:

1. Create multiple news hooks designed to connect with key media segments like Tech, Business, Gaming and Consumer
2. Bring together a live panel discussion to provide third-party validation
3. Design a surprise to hold interest, build drama and drive coverage
4. Invite real enthusiasts, not just the press, to fuel enthusiasm

A surprise appearance by Batman drove mainstream coverage with a tie to how SSDs enhance video games like Arkham City

One Event, One Million Impressions

A live panel of industry experts lent third-party validation and answered questions from journalists

So far, we’ve garnered top-flight media coverage overall, generating a million impressions in valuable consumer tech and gaming media.

Hot News: MOM Brands (formerly Malt-O-Meal) is resurrecting an old tagline.

That wouldn’t be interesting, except that the slogan they’re resurrecting is someone else’s—Pepsi’s “The Choice of a New Generation,” which will now be used for MOM’s Better Oats oatmeal.

This isn’t accidental imitation—the folks at MOM made a conscious decision to glom onto the 1980s soft drink slogan, which AdAge tells us Pepsi has not used since 1991 and no longer trademarks:

“The approach suits the penny-pinching style of MOM Brands,” says AdAge, ‘Which wanted to avoid the costly exercise of paying a branding agency to create something from scratch, said Linda Fisher, the company’s corporate communications manager.”

These are painful words to those of us who create brands and taglines from scratch—and go to significant lengths to avoid duplicating existing material.

But even the hardiest agency staffer would have to admit that many taglines could apply to more than one company or product: “We Try Harder,” “Rethink Possible,” “Have It Your Way,” etc.

Even so, recycling “Choice of a New Generation” just feels meaningless.

‘We’re a little bit scrappy,’ Fisher went on to say. ‘It makes sense. We’re not force-fitting it. Better Oats is the choice of a new generation. It just happens to apply to oatmeal, not cola.’

OK. So what’s the takeaway for brand marketers and their taglines?

• First, even the most broadly applicable tagline will have tremendous equity if it’s maintained well. Lots of drinks are “Good to the Last Drop,” but Maxwell House coffee has pounded home that slogan since 1907, and stands today as the second-largest supermarket coffee brand, with recognition spanning every generation of consumers. You might be bored with your tagline, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not still effective.
• Second, there’s a lot to be said for taglines that get specific. M&M’s “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand” has been touting a unique product feature since 1954. And “Pardon Me, Do You Have Any Grey Poupon?” has created instant mustard-as-luxury-item aura for decades. These tags represent both meaningful and strategic brand positioning.
• Lastly, this is an age of sampling, remixing, and mashing up. So there’s a certain logic to MOM’s tagline move, and they’re definitely reaping some ancillary PR benefits (e.g., this blog post).

But let’s face it—good taglines don’t generate discussions about taglines. They just make you say, “Yeah!”

So does MOM’s move to a new, old tagline make you say, “Yeah!”?

Mike Gaertner is a massive gadget geek and Yankees fan living in San Francisco. He’s written in the past on the subject of celebrity endorsers in this blog. You’ll also find him tweeting as @suburb and sounding off on Tumblr at mixta.pe, where this post originally appeared.

After reading some of the news coming out of Mobile World Congress, I had a conversation with a colleague today about Blackberry’s last-ditch latest effort to connect with a younger, hipper crowd.

Playing off their recent TV spots that leverage some well-known and up-and-coming DJs, including Diplo and The Martinez Brothers, Blackberry has partnered with the Pacemaker DJ tool for an exclusive new DJ app for their Playbook tablet. The intent, of course, is to position Blackberry as more than the enterprise-only device maker that has led to both their early success and recent struggles. The technology is inherently cool and if the history behind the Pacemaker is any indicator, the launch could be a pretty welcome addition to any DJ’s arsenal.

But something doesn’t sit well with me.

My colleague’s thought: this push is a strong indicator that Blackberry was making some real moves to reposition itself. My thought: you can’t purchase cool, and this was the equivalent of seeing your uncle rant about how great The Black Keys show was last week.

Sure, endorsements can work. Endorsements led to the astronomical success of Beats by Dre. In fact, as Jimmie Iovine revealed, it was pretty much their only launch strategy. But endorsements and brand alignments need to be believable to be credible. Did anyone really think that Tiger was driving a Buick? Or that Mariano Rivera ate at Taco Bell? Nope. The disconnect in each of those cases is just too wide.

Blackberry doesn’t need DJs to make them cool. What they need now more than ever is a killer product to make them cool. Hell, it took them nearly a year after launch to get native email working on the Playbook. That’s right, until last week, the Playbook could’t handle the main feature that was the cornerstone of Blackberry’s utility. Blackberry’s made some strong moves to clean house and give its dev team a swift kick in the ass, but its going to take a string of product successes for me, and likely many people, to believe that anybody at all is using their Blackberry, nevermind the highly sought after compensated DJ jetsetter spokesperson.

So, Blackberry, get your product right, and then we’ll talk about who should be hawking. Until then your cool can’t be purchased, it needs to be earned.

Thoughts?

We hope you enjoy our 2011 agency reel as much as we enjoyed bringing all this action together in one place. Huge kudos to our talented—and tireless—motion design team and some very special clients.

Recently, two important gatherings—the PSFK Conference in San Francisco and the 4A’s Strategy Festival in New York—brought industry pros together to explore the latest trends, inspirations and ideas in creative strategies.

Two of our fearless brand engagement strategists made the scene at both of these events, and we naturally wanted to know what they came away with. This is the first in a series exploring key topics as reported by Mike Gaertner, brand engagement strategy director (@suburb), and Kelly Patrick Rupp, associate brand engagement strategist (@kpr_).

Q1 // What are your big takeaways from these events—and where did the two gatherings intersect?

GAERTNER: Wow, my biggest takeaway is I better start working even harder if I don’t want some new kid on the block to take my position! Kelly, I got my eye on you…

A great concept—“experience is the killer of innovation”—came out of a talk on how Levi’s is reimagining their stonewashing process to virtually eliminate the need for water. They’d been using the same process for decades, and no one had questioned the experts who performed the task. In most businesses, we venerate experience, but in this age of rolling betas and continuous reinvention, that’s not necessarily a good thing. Experience forms habits and sometimes ignores new possibilities. Once they looked into the “why” of their process, some new and amazing possibilities emerged.

Question what we think we “know” and you’ll find new opportunity and knowledge. It’s a good reminder to keep in the back of my head—but more importantly it’s a bit of a swift kick in the ass. Seeing some of the young gun planners at the AAAAs Strategy Fest present their ideas on our profession and our process with only a few years of experience under their belt was really refreshing.

RUPP: I’m not sure when the rest of the industry will catch on, but the biggest thing for me right now is not simply acknowledging that this industry is changing rapidly, but putting change into practice. As behavioral change continues to affect the way that people consume media, it’s becoming more and more indisputable that if we continue to talk to people the way we’ve been talking to them for the last few decades, they’re likely going to keep ignoring us. It’s interesting to think about how much differently humans behave and consume media in 2011 versus 1999, and then think about how much differently brands are behaving in 2011 versus 1999.

If your brand is still behaving like it would have 10 years ago, it’s time to ask yourself why and whether that makes sense. It’s time to look at everything we do as agencies and agency people and ask ourselves why we’re doing it the way we are. Just because it’s worked in the past doesn’t make it right. The blessing and the curse in advertising is that almost nothing can be proven. Just when we think we know what works, it gets turned on its head.

Q2 // What are some of the key trends we’re seeing right now?

GAERTNER: The ways we look at our clients’ needs: We’re moving away from communicating static messages and instead solving real problems. It’s a nuanced shift: no longer asking, “What do we want to do?” but rather, “What do we want to accomplish?”

The way we define audiences: We have better ways to understand our consumers outside of their HHI or job title. Social’s given us the keys to their emotional and behavioral profiles, so we can’t start lumping them all together in a pile of like-minded statistics.

The way we blur content and advertising: The goal should no longer be to simply get people to read, watch or engage with what we create. We should aim to get them to WANT to read, watch and engage. Why create ads to promote content when the best advertising these days is content?

RUPP: For agencies, being lean/nimble/agile seems to be a very hot-button issue. It’s a little baffling that it’s taken this long for agencies to take a step back and look at their business models and say, “wow, look at all this time and money and energy we’re wasting.” In a lean planning workshop at the 4A’s conference we listened to Farrah Bostic talk about lean planning. At the end of the workshop we got into groups and were each assigned different male-centric products to market to women. One group was tasked with the Samsung Galaxy Tablet. In about 15 minutes they came up with same strategy that took 10 weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars to put together in an agency. We can’t be afraid to fail, to put things out there that aren’t perfect and get real-time feedback from real people. We don’t need mountains of market research, we need to hypothesize, build, talk to people and iterate.

For brands, I think Hugh MacLeod says it best, “If you talked to people the way advertising talks to people, they’d punch you in the face.” Like Yves Behar talked about at this month’s PSFK conference, you can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes anymore. You can’t just make things up and expect people to blindly believe them. With social media and the internet, it takes a matter of seconds for consumers to be able to validate a brand’s claims. Right now, you really have to look inside your brand and really work to understand your brand’s soul and who that soul is relevant to. People want to align themselves with brands whose belief systems are similar to theirs. But as soon as they find out your brand isn’t being honest, you can be sure they’ll quickly be able to find another brand that is.

For advertising, when you step back and look at all the resources we have in this industry, it seems a little crazy that we tend to use those resources to make things that don’t really solve anybody’s problems. Ask yourself when the last time a banner ad or a print ad really added any value for you or solved a real problem?

It’s not enough to be entertaining. We need start thinking about how we can do more than just communicate messages. How can we actually be in service of the people we’re looking to talk to? How can we make their lives easier in a way that’s relevant to the brand? I think we need start building real things, real services that are useful and valuable. Jim Stengel, a long time consultant and former CMO, talked about how agencies are essentially tee’d up to create real products and services, yet we tend to think, “that’s not our job.” Bullshit. Why not?

The true impact Steve Jobs will have on our lives has yet to be measured.

Beyond the radical change he brought to technology, business and culture—including the way we think of branding today—his personal philosophy is well worth remembering, tempered as it was by a sense of his own mortality. Here is a passage from his well-known 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

“Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

“And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Loomis Group recently created the Dream Lashes application on Facebook for Sephora, where we ask Sephora’s clientele to embark on their dream lash journey to find the perfect formula for their lashes and personality.

Depending on your social agenda and mood, you could be the Girl Next Door, Fashionista, Rocker, Drama Queen, Femme Fatale… well, play the game and find out for yourself!

This project follows Loomis Group’s recent work on the official relaunch of Sephora’s YouTube brand channel, where Sephora’s socially active clientele can easily discover what’s trending, learn tips from the pros and share their own experiences. Learn more about that project in our recent blog post.

Stacy Grisinger heads up Loomis Group Boston and has been with the agency since 2002.

Working in PR all these years I have an obsession with news, and I’ve got my media habits down to a science, first grabbing a few minutes of the morning shows, then onto online and Twitter and then the good ole newspapers.

This week, unless one was living under a rock, it would be hard miss some of the coverage surrounding the 10th anniversary of the September 11th tragedies.

While I usually tend to agree when the media is over-sensationalizing something, right now I think we can use this time of remembrance.

We all have our memories of where we were on 9/11 and how it affected us. I was working from my home office in upstate New York that day; had just grabbed my coffee and turned on my computer to jump into getting out a product launch for one of our technology clients, when the phone rang. It was my sister, sounding almost hysterical. I heard my father say “Calm down Deb, tell me again where you are?”

Where was she? In a building on the World Trade Center campus (thankfully not in one of the two towers, but in the building directly adjacent). She was working production on a TV show and had arrived at 7:00 am to be ready for the early call time.

We were able to take in from her that they thought they were being bombed, she could see burning out the window, and that they were being told to take the stairs down to the sub-basement bomb shelter.

The call was then cut off and we did not hear from her again for more than 36 hours. A long time to wait, given the events that started to unfold on our TV screen minutes later.

She was one of the lucky ones who was safely evacuated—you know, one of the people covered from head-to-toe in grey ash. She made it down to the waterfront and was taken to Staten Island where she was eventually examined by medics, along with hundreds of other people. She was taken in by a stranger who gave her food, a shower, clothes and a place to stay.

There was no phone service so we only heard she was safe after about a day and a half, and it was through word of mouth from a friend in the city. Watching my mother go through that wait time was unnerving.

In the larger scheme, we are one of the families that was barely scratched by the tragedy. My sister bears the memory of having seen things that no human eyes should; watching someone choose to jump from 100 floors up rather than face the horror that was taking place inside those towers. I understand that witnessing it firsthand weighs on the mind and soul deesply.

There’s no doubt the media kicks into overdrive on many a given topic, but for this weekend I’m letting that feeling go. The vast media coverage honoring victims and survivors of all types is needed right now for many, many reasons.

If the coverage can help us remember who we were as a nation at that time, and give us just a bit of that back, I’m on board with going overboard on this one.

Like most agencies, Loomis Group does a fair amount of media training for our clients, and one of the basic premises we try to convey is that you want to stay on message and deliver your talking points multiple times to ensure that the reporter and your audience hear them.

It’s a good tactic, but as important as it is, you can’t lose track of the larger strategic purpose—building good relationships with the media.

How you use your talking points in interviews will make or break your pitch—do it poorly, and your interview could end up going viral, like this.

Here’s an amazing bit of video that starts to sound like a Monty Python sketch. In a wonderful demonstration of the limitations of the talking-point approach to interview preparation, Damon Green interviews British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, asking six questions and getting pretty much the same response to each of them.

As media trainer and author Clarence Jones states, the way to build good relations with the media, and with your audience, is to come across as a “good guy,” not a “bad guy.”

Good guys are open, forthright, bold but not arrogant, strong but thoughtful, and generally positive and respectful in outlook. Bad guys are shifty and misleading, hide behind canned responses, and convey negative attitudes and disrespect to the interviewer (and by extension, to the audience).

In his interview, Miliband clearly has a point he wants to make, and he does. So far, so good. But the manner he uses is deeply disrespectful to the interviewer. Miliband is basically saying, “you are not worthy of a real conversation, your questions aren’t worth engaging with, and I’m just going to recite my script again and again.”

A much better approach would have been to at least acknowledge the questions, and offer a sentence or two that responded to them, while incorporating some of your talking points. Doing this on the fly in a video situation isn’t trivial, but with simple training and some practice, it can be learned. And it’s an important skill for a politician or executive to have.

Now, in the short term, Miliband’s tactic probably worked. If a TV station broadcast a small piece of the interview, it would necessarily include the talking points Miliband wanted to get out.

Five or ten years ago, that probably would have been that. But today, because the raw video footage was way too funny to not leak out, it’s available worldwide, and will continue to be for years.

And Green, the interviewer, took to the net to discuss the interview from his perspective, and make a larger point, noting, “If news reporters and cameras are only there to be used by politicians as recording devices for their scripted soundbites, at best that is a professional discourtesy.

“At worst, if we are not allowed to explore and examine a politician’s views, then politicians cease to be accountable in the most obvious way.”

So Miliband becomes not only a laughingstock—dubbed “Ed Milibot” in the Twittersphere—but also a poster boy for a fundamental problem in the world of government in the 21st Century.

Ed Miliband won the battle of getting his talking point out, but lost the war by coming across as a “bad guy.” On the upside, he’s provided a great object lesson in media relations.

Over the past few years, “Release the brand!” has been a sort of battle cry for folks who are trying to divine where marketing and advertising are headed. The meaning behind the battle cry? They say marketers must accept that, in an age of heightened interactivity, consumers are the ultimate owners of your brand—and the age of top-down marketing messaging is over.

We invited Sephora's fans into the YouTube brand channel experience to share tips and product reviews

Release the brand? Not so fast!

Now, when it comes to getting at the zeitgeist of creative marketing and the ad game, calmer and more historically minded heads have offered some deeper thoughts on the matter. Here’s an excerpt from a fall 2008 post on Experience: The Blog:

“Marketers also need to lose the idea that they have to give up control of brands on the Internet because social media users will do whatever they want with it. It’s true that you have less control. But this mantra about giving up control is highly misleading…rather than denying or minimizing the power of the consumer in the era of Social Media, why not recognize that consumers have had this power all along? Smart marketers have always known they share control of the brand with consumers.” (my emphasis)

Share the brand!

I think the quote above tells us a lot about where we are at this point in the state of advertising. I don’t have the stats sitting right here, but in our increasingly busy and challenged world it seems doubtful to me that consumers have the time or the inclination to actively take control of their favorite (or for that matter, most reviled) brands.

That’s not to say there isn’t a core group of motivated consumers who are taking control. The flood of consumer-created logos in response to The Gap’s recent logo redesign fiasco offers at least anecdotal proof that consumers have a definite amount of active brand influence.

But what’s even more important is that after the initial appearance of the logo, The Gap went out of their way to ask consumers to share their opinions about the new logo. That’s the one piece they got right, if after the fact.

Aha, there’s that “share” word again. If anyone cared to pin me down on the zeitgeist of today’s ad world, I would put big blazing neon signs around that word.

Okay, but here’s the thing: even if we accept the premise that most consumers are not as actively involved in brand creation as some might like to think, it does not mean that they’re not actively engaged with brands—they most certainly are.

Invite participation!

And here’s where I think ad agencies remain relevant in our increasingly socially networked world. See, if most consumers are engaged with brands but not necessarily going out of their way to “create” the brand themselves, they’re still looking to be invited into a brand experience that inspires them and that they can shape.

And who makes those brand experiences? Agencies, among other folks:

• The most obvious example that comes to mind is Wieden and Kennedy’s Old Spice man, who invited consumers to take part in the story—and they did take part, with considerable gusto.
• Our own YouTube projects have also invited and earned considerable consumer engagement for the Sephora and LG Electronics brand channels, where consumers upload their own product reviews and tips.
• And, we’ve invited folks to take part in Samsung’s Facebook experience, on behalf of their successful solid state drive launch, that connected with your Facebook page to take you beyond the typical product demo.

So, it wasn’t the technology of social media itself that made all of the difference. It was the invitation!