Start-Up Brand Jury and The Citizen Kane of Yogurt Commercials

When I started in advertising before the beginning of recorded history, I worked at a variety of agencies. And we always feared consumer feedback on our ads -- well, maybe that's a little too sweeping. Actually, what we feared was copy testing. McCollum-Spielman, and the dreaded ARS test.

We also feared client reaction to consumer letters. While I never worked on the brand Yoplait, I had friends that did, and they created one of the most remarkable pieces of advertising I ever saw, called "Nothing on the bottom." The ad was basically 30 seconds of seeing cute butts walk away from camera, dramatizing the dieting benefits of eating the yogurt, while simultaneously making the prestirred characteristic of Yoplait a benefit. For you see, many people [thought they] preferred the fruit on the bottom Dannon brand. But Yoplait was the yogurt with "Nothing on the bottom."

Nothing butt natural.

Nothing butt low fat.

Nothing on the bottom...

And that's the end of that!

Sadly, that was the end of that.

The story goes that the ad contained one baby's naked tuckus, and a handful of users were offended. They wrote, and the campaign, which I will editorialize and say was the Citizen Kane of yogurt advertising, was killed after one flight. Now, there were other reasons why the campaign died, notleast because Yoplait actually had a fruit on the bottom offering. Though it was a tiny fraction of their total sales But in my opinion sometimes you have to overlook this tiny fraction of a strategic misfire for copy genius. Cuz genius it was.

So what does this have to do with the start up Brand Jury? Well, nothing and everything. Because what brand jury is is a community of opinionated people and brands -- a community where consumers can sound off about ads, handing out kudos or raspberries. But wait, there's more! that same community gives viewers the opportunity to make their own ads -- using concepts that they consider better than the pro version submitted by the brand.

Here's their indisputably inventive Tech Crunch Elevator Pitch:

It's sort of twisted, eeh?

But regardless of that, I love this concept, because it creates what I feel will be a far better way to collect consumer feedback about brands. A mechanism not driven by bizarre testing methodologies, or write-in campaigns from Concerned Citizens for a Misguided Definition of Decency. Rather, people that care -- whether for positive or negative reasons -- can provide a host of comments about a concept, and truly enrich brand understanding as they solidify their own brand relationships.

Brand Jury is in private beta, and I am not in yet. But I'll be writing more when I am.

And if the creative people working on Yoplait are reading this, maybe that fine assy campaign can be resurrected. Because it was worthy of a yogurt Clio!

In the meantime, enjoy this funny bit of Yoplait-inspired UGC:

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

White Paper Thursdays: Combating Gripe Sites

A good white paper about managing brand reputation -- particularly "gripe sites" (you know the drill <<>>SUCKS.com) is available here. Made available by Fairwinds Consulting.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

White Paper Thursdays: Digital Darwinism

A beautiful and tight preso on the changing nature of branding. By Joe Crump of Avenue A-Razorfish. A really rich read.

Digital Darwinism

View SlideShare presentation (tags: | a avenue razorfish)

Netiquette and Brand Reputation

I have been thinking a great deal about brand reputation management this week. One of the things I've found on the topic that I liked a lot was this piece by Will Beresford, Strategy Director at Beyond Analysis. Entitled "Social Netiquette for Brands, - A 10-Step Guide To Winning New Friends On the Social Web," it outlines -- you guessed it -- ten simple and telegraphic steps to better build and preserve your social aura online.

Check it out.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

What's Your Brand Rep?

I really appreciated Peter Hershberg's commentary in MediaPost this week on "Five Ways to Manage Your Brand Reputation" online. Five simple ideas that so few companies seem to have internalized. But today is a fresh chance to do so.

Anyway, check it out here.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Why Are Retail Brands So One Way?

(Retailer pride: an impossible dream?)

One of the really interesting developments in branding over the past 25 or so years has been the creation of brands with which consumers identify and participate. Nike was the pioneer, of course, but other brands -- like Cadillac of late, and Abercrombie and Fitch, and i-*.* from Apple -- have also accomplished this. Naturally, the degree to which brands have achieved this objective has varied, but all over the country you will find people who pay lots of money for t-shirts with brand logos, or who build "I love..." websites.

A major step forward in this area has been Social Vibe, a service that connects brands to social media influencers by offering them social compensation, charitable donations, and great creative with which to adorn their personal web pages. You join, find a brand you love, and pick a piece of creative to feature on your profile. Full disclosure: SocialVibe was a C:SF client, so take my endorsement for what you will.

But whether you are thinking about t-shirts or beautiful brand graphics for personal pages, there are some brands that seem not to participate in this at all. And that "some" seems to include most retailers. To prove the point, let's consider what someone would be trying to communicate about themself with a t-shirt bearing the following logos:

Budweiser: American, patriotic, perhaps sports fan, solid, All American
Pepsi: Youthful, perhaps brash, celebrity oriented
Dr. Pepper: individualistic, contrarian
Body Shop: green, socially responsible, organic, natural
M&Ms: kid like, irreverent, geeky cool

Now, consider the following massive brands. What would a t-shirt bearing their logos stand for?

BestBuy
Dillard's
Publix
Wal-Mart

If I saw one, the message I would get is "BestBuy gave out free t-shirts." It would not compute that someone actually paid money -- financially sought out their logo on a t-shirt.

Now I should be honest and say I don't know if these companies sell branded wear. For all I know there is a robust business in Dillard's tanktops, and a vibrant eBay community trading Dillard's designs like others trade Beanie Babies.

OK. So...there are a couple of retailer brands that I could see getting people to buy their shirts -- so long as they were pretty cheap:

Target: because chances are it would have a cool logo design
Whole Foods: greeen, etc.

But it's not a "natural" in the way that selling Pepsi shirts might be.

The point is that most retail brands don't really seek to get consumers to identify with their brands. I think this is a big mistake because many retail brands really make possible a certain lifestyle by offering a range of accoutrement's associated with living a certain kind of existence.

Think about the following:

Macy's: upscale, aspirational lifestyle, a little blingy
Wal-Mart: unabashedly blue collar, 'Merican. This is actually an image a lot of people seek to communicate. Jeff Foxworthy don't sell a lot of redneck books fer nuthin'.



PiggyWiggly: kid at heart, all American, solid
Dillard's: unabashedly Southern and cultured

The list goes on.

Digital offers a huge platform by which retailers can begin to create those sorts of participatory brands. Let's hope they capitalize on digital to do so.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Attack Attack Attack

An interesting piece from the New York Times about Fox News's approach to other reporters reporting on Fox's reporters is available here. Interestingly, online activity has increasingly become part of their reportoire.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

"Aggressive Online Behavior"

I am a scrounger for free online info, and a white paper hoarder. That said, there are certain things that everyone should read, and this is one of them. It is an excellent white paper on how to deal with "aggressive, destructive consumer behavior" designed to inpugn reputations or interrupt business. If I had a nickel for every company that has asked me about this topic...

The authors, Misters Urs Gasser and John G. Palfrey, Jr. provided a thorough way of thinking about UGC, and a series of steps to prepare and combat aggressive UGC. Download it from the Cymfony website here.

Or join the new site eMarketing Papers free (where I found it) and grab it along with a treasure trove of other marketing white papers. You'll be happy you did.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

The Shirtless Brand

I’m 43. The last year of the baby boom. And probably the biggest difference between a boomer and a millennial (digitally speaking) is a concern for privacy. We generally have it. They mostly don’t. Even when I looked good with my shirt off, I don’t think I would ever have dreamed of putting a topless picture of myself in a place where everyone could see it. It just wasn’t done. And…why would I want to do that?

Ditto my partying self. I would no more have wanted to let the world see a photo of me with a lampshade on my head than I would have EL Marko’d 666 on my forehead at a Pentecostal Revival. And yet I have friends in the younger set that have plenty of red eyed party photos hanging out there on the web.

The same goes for less extreme expressions of openness. I am not comfortable with the idea of a FaceBook page that merges my personal and work lives. But millions are.

That strong sense of privacy also affects my feelings about how to market. My instinct is to provide a defined, finite message. 2-2-2-mints-in-one! This is what I want you to see and think and repeat. That doesn’t work anymore. If as a marketer I don’t let it all hang out, people online will either let it out in spite of my wishes, or publicly surmise about what I haven’t revealed.

I think there is no better evidence of this than Wal-Mart’s PR issues over the past several years. Nothing can be guaranteed to stay secret anymore. Except the identities of the oil execs that wrote the energy policy with Dick Cheney. But that is not something for this blog.

What is is is beginning to formulate ideas on a new definition of integrated marketing. Of recognizing that what’s important in providing an integrated message is not that everything be PMS 243, but rather that we define a brand in the context of its meaning rather than its brand dress. OK, OK, you can say “d’uh” all you want, but think about your last 10 comments in creative meetings. And then you’ll see that you aren’t all Mr/Ms Perfect. Take that, smug ones!

Today, we haven’t a prayer of ensuring that text not appear within 10 picas of the logo – in part because no one remembers what a pica is anymore. But we can create assets that reflect the spirit of the brand, of which appearance may – or may not – be a part. That reflect the voice of the brand, rather than necessarily a tagline. Or if we have a tagline, to have the sense to make it emotive rather than kerplunk descriptive.

One thing I used to use in presentations was a graphic I found online of the Coke logo with the red swapped out for Pepsi blue. It was made by a fan of Coke who thought it looked better. That sound you just heard was the simultaneous dry heave of half of the people of Atlanta. Coke in Pepsi blue? It’s sacrilege! I’d never say a brand should ignore that sort of thing. But not all UGC is harmful, even if it isn’t approved by the brand cops.

Note to self: spend less time worrying about the size of the logo in an ad, and more about the spirit expressed in the message. And get with the digital program.

So I made a MySpace and a Facebook page. Hey, I’m a joiner. And I think I would be drummed out of digital if I didn’t have a FunWall and a Facebook Newsfeed that told me that someone I barely know is eating bacon for breakfast.

I changed a bit. But I categorically refuse to post shirtless pics on those pages.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to write.

Citizen Journalists and Citizen DeMilles

Parody is often a form of flattery. At the very least it is a route to notoriety. 10,000 years ago when I was knee high to a grasshopper, there was a Saturday Night Live TV Ad Skit in which Gilda Radner discussed Autumn Fizz, the first carbonated douche. It was a spoof of those Summer’s Eve commercials in which a Mother and Daughter discussed vaginal freshness while cruising in a rowboat. Parody is nothing new.

But now, Saturday Night Live makes a Clinton/Obama debate spoof and it becomes the topic of a presidential debate for several minutes. I won’t try to read too much into this as evidence of the decay of our political system. There have been, after all, 20 Democratic Presidential debates so they may have said about all they have to say about how ready they are going to be on day one.

What it DOES demonstrate, though, is how important parody has become in our culture. And it has also become a critical part of what drives brand impressions. Go to YouTube and type in commercial parody and see what you find. Well, don’t bother, I’ll show you some of what you’ll find here:



Well, a HUGE portion of the vids are Apple spoofs. And some are critical of the company. But most aren’t. They are really more about the ad campaigns, which are always iconic.

I think it’s great when companies just let this happen. No cease and desists, no quiet efforts to get the messages pulled. They just let what happens happen.
The thing is, by respecting the freedom of expression of others, companies score points. Consider Amazon’s Kindle.

Unquestionably an important initiative for the company, the device attracted competing choruses of believers and detractors when it launch a couple months ago. Like all products on Amazon, Kindle’s pages allow people to make comments, either positive or negative. The result? The device had a score of about three (of five) stars for its first couple of weeks. Now it’s running at 3.5 stars.

I don’t doubt for a moment that Amazon people watched this scoring with some misgivings. But they let the voting and the commenting continue. Because they made a commitment to consumer comments for their whole site. They understood that the implications of such a commitment don’t always go how you want them to.

In my decidedly unscientific sampling of comments, I found that Kindle positives were from people who had the device and liked it. Most pointed out a few issues.

The negatives were more often than not people who had never touched the device but had passionate comments about Kindle’s appearance, the whole DRM issue, and the pricing. In the end, I bought one satisfied that the positives outweighed the negatives for me, and I’m pleased with it. But I am even more pleased with Amazon because they did the right thing, not the easy thing.

Of course, in a way they had no choice. Censorship is easy to spot online. And impeding negative posters on the Amazon site would only enrich their passion for being heard off the site. The message would get out. As would the evidence of censorship. And such evidence would have done far more damage than a thousand or so negative comments about cost and DRM.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.

Heckle Me This

They’re out there. No matter how great your brand is, there are people who are bitching about it to someone. If they are doing it online, their audience size can be tremendous. I know of one brand that has a detractor that received tens of thousands of uniques a month to his bitching site. I won’t tell you WHAT brand, because it’ll just add thousands more, and get me in the middle of something that is none of my business. But your brand is your business. And taking an active role in digital reputation influencing is absolutely critical.

The Control Fallacy

You cannot control what people say about your brand. I’d add the word "anymore" to that sentence, but the reality is that you never could. What is new is the potential audience size that a brand heckler can reach.

Unless you’re the Chinese Government, and you are capable of censoring ALL of digital for your users, control is simply not an option.

But there is a ginormous difference between control and doing nothing. You CAN help to influence discussion about your brand, and with it your brand’s reputation. But to do this effectively, you need a brand reputation plan.

Seven Basic Steps

Broadly, digital reputation influencing is a seven step process:

1. Monitor the digital ether. You can start by doing a Yahoo or Goggle search for your brand. Follow the links, especially to blogs, posts, videos, and other UGC. This can give you some sense of what the broadest reaching messages are saying. Do a simple calculation: Percent positive comments, percent negative, percent neutral. This is often enough to interest the company in the issue and demonstrate its potential importance.


To do really do a thorough job monitoring, you need to do it on a more comprehensive and ongoing basis. Services like Cymfony and Nielsen Buzzmetrics offer ways to conduct comprehensive brand monitoring services across digital. There are many others, and I would be delighted to hear your experiences with these or other services. I have no relationship with either of the mentioned companies.

2. Analyze what you find. What do people say? What are the themes? Are users the key sources of info? Non users? Employees? This will help you develop a plan of action. In my experience, it’s best to define ways to quantify the data so you can set goals for improving the digital reputation environment. Of course, improving will mean different things for different people. For some it will be driving down negatives. For others pushing up positive messages. For still others it might mean trying to get people to talk about your brand at all. A good plan probably should involve all three. But it’s usually easiest to get money to deal with the negatives. ;-)

3. Plan an approach to address. You should never go at digital willy nilly, and this is especially true for reputation influencing. What are your goals? How are
they quantifiable? How will you measure progress? How will you know you have succeeded? What tools will you use?

One of the most overlooked approaches is to reach out to hecklers and ask them why they feel the way they do. Most people will be impressed if you show genuine concern and reach out.

Major “macro” issues might also be in play. Ecology and green are going to be major sources of kudos and raspberries in the next few years. Are you prepared? Do you have a positive message to deliver? Or are the issues blurry? Having a communications plan focused on the millions of citizen journalists out there would probably be wise.

4. Message to impact the dialogue: This is where you put your plan into action. Say what you planned to say in the ways you planned to say it.

5. Empower your evangelists: Almost all brands have megafans. Even the most maligned brands. I, for example, am huge defender for the United States Postal Service. I won’t get on my soapbox for long, but how amazing is it that for less than 1/6 of the price of a Starbucks latte they can get a birthday card to my Mom across the country in a couple days?

By giving your fans tools to talk you up, you influence the digosphere hugely. Hey Postmaster General, are you listening???

Take this example. If you were looking at a hybrid car, and there were 65 negative comments online, and 80 positive, you’d probably feel ambivalent. But if the hybrid brand had succeeded in encouraging 1000 of their drivers to talk the car up, you’re looking at 95% online favorability. Your prospect will feel much better buying you with that behind them. Since people are by some estimates 20 times more likely to heckle then to applaud, you can simply level the playing field through proactive user empowerment.

6. Assess your effectiveness: Is what you’re doing working? Did you deliver? Prepare your scorecard. Be honest.

7. Optimize your plan by identifying what works and learning from mistakes: Remember this is not a sprint. It is a marathon. And with digital, nothing is permanent. Nothing is “done”. It’s all constantly in process. And by continuous optimization you’ll get better and better at this.

Talk to an Expert

I ain’t one. But I am a firm believer that marketing ain’t rocket science, and I have an opinion on everything. I am also a believer in finding someone more adept and experienced in important areas like this. Your corporate comms people may fit the bill. Or an agency. Or a consultant. They can breathe life into your program in ways I can’t even imagine.

Thanks for reading. And don’t forget to write…