Granted, it would be better if those residents of the C-Suite had a guide who knew how to lead them throw the social media jungle. Obviously I think social media is the best marketing tool to come along since traveling medicine shows. Both relied on word-of-mouth to sell their products. One was and one is highly effective.

While those executives should do a better job of searching, I also fault we social media marketers. We are part of the problem. We need to make a better case for what we do. We need to show the skeptical executives that the social media sphere is the best place to be. These are people who are used to “fire and forget” marketing. In their world they tell their marketing people to hire an agency and produce a campaign. The only time an executive sees the campaign is in the final approval process. You have to show them how social media is replacing all of that.

What those executives want is a demonstrated method that is going to drive sales and profits. They want to know what the return-on-investment for the money, time and effort they are going to have to put into social media. They don’t feel any need to tell their friends where they are eating or whether they are leading in some kind of faux friend race.

So what do you do to convince them there they should be parking some of their marketing dollars in social media?

First, let me tell you what I don’t do first. I never show anyone Facebook as a marketing tool in the first meeting. To the average 50ish executive, Facebook is where their children post pictures of their dogs and friends. Plus, they have had their personal people tell them a seemingly good job candidate was rejected because of those pictures from that fraternity party. At best they see no need for Facebook, at worst they see it has a huge waste of time. As I once had an executive tell me: “there is a reason why I do not want to connect with people I knew in high school.”

What I do show them are the facts and figures showing how effective certain kinds of social meeting marketing can be. I also show them examples of companies such as Ford, Zappos, and others that used social media to expand their footprint in their marketplace.

When it comes to specific sites, I usually start off talking about what Linkedin can do for their company. Why Linkedin? Well in the business world it is viewed as the adult Facebook. Most likely the executives you are talking to have a Linkedin profile. They understand how it works and its effectiveness. They know their company has found good candidates for open positions.

In short, they understand how effective Linkedin can be when used properly. It is an easier sell. Not easy, but easier.

The second thing I talk about is blogging. It is a little tougher to sell than Linkedin. Executives usually balk at first when I tell a blog is not a sales document. But when I show how potential clients are drawn to the company’s website by a well-written blog that demonstrates the company’s expertise, the light bulb usually goes on.

From there I move onto YouTube. Watching a video campaign – such as “Will It Blend” shows the effectiveness of using sites such as YouTube. After that comes Twitter, which I describe as a billboard for their company. It is a term they understand.

I also make it clear that it usually takes six months to a year to see the results of a social media campaign. By then, having seen the results of successful campaigns, they get it and are willing to make the investment.

What I just gave you was view from 35,000 feet of my process. Trust me works, but only if you are careful to separate the substantive from the nonsense.

Among that last sheaf of messages is a group that is really starting to bother me. It has gotten to the point that I have been flagging them as spam and blocking the senders.

Who are these annoying senders? Are they insurance salesmen, Nigerian widows offering me millions, or schemes telling me how I can make millions while working only 20 minutes a day? Nope, not one from one of those groups.

Where that email is originating is from so-called social media “experts.”

These are people who you would think would know better. After all, they claim to be social media experts. But apparently in their effort to learn about social media, no one explained push vs. pull marketing to them.

In brief, social media’s foundation is pull marketing. What that means is a company provides evidence that it is an expert at what it does or how it makes quality products. It does not send that information out itself. Rather satisfied clients spread the word around the Internet. That builds positive word-of-mouth, which in turn builds engagement and eventually sales.

What that means is one notice sent out. If it is worth reading, or attending, people will. It is more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

What is not done is acting like a used car salesman and bombarding a potential customer with a dozen or more sales messages.

That’s exactly how I feel when I receive one of these emails telling everything they can do. I don’t care. When I help on something, I go looking for it.

One English-based trainer has sent me seven emails in the last two weeks touting her social media training systems. If an email can be described as breathless, these would fit that description. The subject line on one read: “complete social media course – last remaining places!”

Another group I joined (now that was a mistake) keeps urging me to post on Craigslist. I get one of those about once a week. I tried it once – it didn’t go well.

Then there is my personal favorite. I keep getting emails from people asking me to endorse them. If I do that for them, they tell me they will reciprocate and endorse me. Now mind you, I don’t even know these people, let alone worked with them.

I have a very firm rule about endorsements. I will only do it if I actually know you and worked with you. What value is an endorsement from someone who knows nothing about you? I also never ask for endorsements. If somebody likes my work, they can feel free to endorse me. But that’s up to them.

I am currently taking a sales training course from Westboro, Mass.-based Kurlan & Associates Inc. One of the first lessons we were taught is that people hate sales calls. When you connect with a potential customer start off just saying your name. Then discuss how you can help them. Don’t go on and list all the things you can do. At that point, they don’t care.

So when I get an email or a call from so-called “social media expert,” I immediately know they are not. The step is to hang up or hit the delete button.

What the Brewers did and didn’t do is also a lesson for any marketer who has an idea that seems to be a surefire winner. I am willing to bet no one in planning the promotion that backfired asked “what if … goes wrong.” Until you think something through from every angle, you are asking for trouble. As the Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu said: “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here’s what happened to the Brewers. As a promotion, the team placed 1,400 statues of mascot Bernie Brewer across Wisconsin parks early Tuesday morning. Some of the statues had a prize attached, including ticket vouchers, player autographs, and merchandise.

The idea was Bernie would tweet clues to the location of each statue so fans could find them. Under the rules, the contest was to begin at 7 a.m. People were supposed to take only one of the statutes. It didn’t work out that way.

Instead, people were grabbing as many as possible. There were reports of people sleeping in their cars overnight near parks where the statutes were to be placed. One woman tweeted she had taken over three dozen. People were trying to sell the statutes on EBay and Craigslist. This caused a lot of angry comments from people who tried to follow the rules.

Clearly no one at the Brewers thought this thing through. This is a clear case I feel of “you know what would be cool?” No one in the meeting asked the “what if fans get greedy and take more than one” question.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true: “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”

There are hundreds of comments on social media sites posted by angry fans. The story went viral. I read a lot of the comments. People are really angry or laughing at the Brewers. Neither is good. The fact that the Brewers insisted that promotion went mostly okay shows me they don’t understand the power of social media.

Where the Brewers failed was not taking human nature into account. You announce you are giving away for free something people want they are going to find ways to game the system. Once the idea of the giveaway was decided on, the next topic of discussion should have been how to prevent the hoarding.

Brewers spokesman said the promotion went well with the exception of “some isolated” incidents. Wrong. They should have apologized profusely. That’s crisis communications 101.

What should the Brewers have done, or more accurately what would I have done?

First, there would have been no actual tickets, merchandise or autographed items in the statues if I were running things. What there would have been were vouchers for those items. Stamped on each voucher would be the words “One Prize Per Address or Family.” No, it wouldn’t have completely stopped the hoarding. But it would have cut down on it.

Second, I would have implanted a locator chip in each Bernie statue. Once I saw that more than Bernie was in one location, I would have noted the IDs on the chips (yes, the technology exists.) Whoever brought any of those hoarded statues in for redemption would have been disqualified automatically.

Third, to prevent anyone from selling the statutes on EBay or Craigslist, I would make it very public that the statutes can be purchased from the Brewers for $48. That would kill that market.

Fourth, I would have made those statues a heck of lot harder to find. Scavenger hunts are not supposed to be easy.

Now it is true that the people who thought they would corner the Bernie Brewer statue market are not particularly ethical or honest. But that’s human nature.

The failure was with the Brewers and their planning. You have to think these things through. It is why the first thing JJC Communications LLC does with a new client is an analysis what could go right and what could wrong. If you only do one of those, you end up with a lot of angry fans and people laughing at you.

If you want to learn more about how to such an analysis, let me know.

It is the fear of the uncertainty of creativity. I think to the average CEO or CMO who came through a business school being creative is a foreign concept. Most of those people are left brain types. Their dominant personality traits are that they are logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective. They are not used to operating in an arena where creativity is demanded. Those traits often lead to the creation of boringly beige ineffective marketing.

The idea of doing something where possible outcomes cannot not always be predicted makes them nervous. So when confronted with something such as social media that demands creativity and intuitive thinking, their brains lock. The simplest thing for them to then do is either reject or ignore the ideas. The idea of a truly out there campaign – no matter how effective it might be – scares them.

I realized this at the Milwaukee-based BizTimesMedia’s 2011 BizTech Conference-Expo. EPrize founder and Chairman Josh Linker was speaking at the conference’s opening breakfast about how to empower employees to be creative. A creative company can develop a strong competitive advantage over its competitors, he argued.

Linker should know. The entrepreneur is also a jazz musician. He explained that any jazz musician that sticks strictly to the score is soon asked to leave. “This fluid, improvisation art form is all about taking risks and trying new things,” Linker wrote in his blog. “Going out on limb can be scary, but it is where the magic happens. Extending yourself outside your comfort zone is where the best rewards will be discovered.”

He goes on to say that “Jazz is also about listening. Listening to your fellow musicians, the audience, and your own creative voice. In business, that means listening to your team, your customers, your competitors, your industry, your suppliers, the latest trends and best practice, and of course, your own creativity. Through focused listening comes adaptation. Allowing the environment and your collaborators to influence the outcome as a group. Seeking inspiration and creativity from others, and adapting in real-time to your own Creative Challenge.”

At the breakfast Linker explained jazz musicians expect creativity from those with whom they perform. The jazz band is a collective creative effort.

The problem for many executives is they run their businesses from the top down. The modern corporate structure is essentially based on a military model. Think about it – there’s the CEO or commanding general. Underneath him are the division leaders. Do you think that designation was an accident? There are senior officers and junior officers, enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. The titles are different, but the roles are the same.

Not an atmosphere that lends itself to nurturing creative impulses. What those companies like is an ad agency coming in and saying we are spending $10 million on this television commercial. We are doing 15 million direct mail pieces and placing ads in 15 national publications. The campaign will look like the campaigns of all their competitors. Cut and dried – and there’s the rub. The CEO and CMO approve it and off it goes. The problem it is formulaic. It is result of that almost always fatal directive “that’s the way we have always done it.”

Many executives live the “fire and forget” marketing campaign. They feel they should not have to be involved in selling their own company. That’s the job of the marketing department and the outside agency.

Think about beer marketing or local auto dealers – all boringly the same.

All good marketing has to be creative. It is like jazz. There are core elements, but each player bends those elements, improves on them, while at the same time staying with the group. It demands that the company executives and employees take any active role in the campaign. It is their company, they should part of the effort to market its products. They need to learn to play with the band. Nine times out of ten, it is really effective. Good marketing works the same way.

There is always element of uncertainty in that. I always tell client not everything we try is going to work. We won’t know what works until we try it. Any marketer who says she does is not telling the truth. You can do all the research possible – from focus groups to surveys – and there is still no predicting the outcome.

As an aside don’t confuse that with measuring return on investment. ROI is measurable. That measurement takes place on what does work.

So if a CEO or CMO is told that the marketing effort is going to more jazz than symphony, they get nervous. It is way outside any envelope in which they operate. Someone needs to take them to a jazz club.

So it would seem at first glance that these companies are starting to embrace new ways of marketing. As most of you know, I firmly believe in melding traditional marketing and public relations with social media. That trilogy of marketing methods is the most effective.

However, I always dig a little deeper. I track these companies’ efforts. What I often find is that instead waltzing with social media, these companies are doing the “Zombie Dance.” All of you remember the Zombie Dance from the first dance you attended. The boy holds his rigid arms straight out and places them on the girl’s shoulders. Because of the distance created by the boy’s arms, the girl is forced to do the same. The pair then moves in a circle, barely lifting their feet off the ground and not bending their knees. It looks like the undead dancing.

That’s what a lot of social media attempts done by large companies especially remind me of – a stiff-armed dance that is about as a rhythmic as a drunk trying to play drums. These companies just don’t get it.

Now I know many CMOs would argue social media is not as important as search for attracting clients and customers. Current research would seem to back this contention up. For instance Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to a study done by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. I would argue that same currently holds true for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sites.

I know when I am looking for something in particular, I usually turn to Google. It is still one of the best ways to conduct research. However, the Pew study also found that “Facebook and other sharing tools, such as Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content.” Although I do search for news, more and more I find myself reading stories friends have suggested or Linkedin. The same true when I shop. I will now often respond to tweets or Facebook friend pages when I am looking for a particular item.

This is where a lot of companies fall down, I feel. They are not integrating their social media efforts with their regular marketing efforts. Just having a Facebook page is not going to cut it. There has to be integration of all the marketing efforts. In this many companies are falling down.

Facebook is not the be all or end all. Blog, videos, and many other tools have to put to work. Yet which some notable exceptions – Dunkin Donuts and Southwest Airlines come to mind – most companies are doing all they could do. And I think I know why.

At major companies, people look at social media and consider it just too much work. Too many marketing departments are too used to using traditional advertising and public relations. It’s inertia. They want to move out of the ruts they are in. And then they wonder why they lose business to their smaller, more nimble competitors.

The cancellation of both shows marks the continuing decline of a once powerful marketing machine. I think social media is doing the same thing to conventional marketing. It won’t happen overnight – and traditional marketing and public relations should still be part of any marketing plan. However, it is going to happen.

What many people don’t know anymore is that soap operas were started in the 1930s on radio by Proctor & Gamble to sell soap and other products – hence the name. According to P&G’s corporate history in 1933 “‘Ma Perkins,’ a radio serial program sponsored by P&G’s Oxydol soap powder, aired nationally. Its popularity leads P&G brands to sponsor numerous new ‘soap operas.’ Faithful listeners become loyal buyers of P&G brands at the grocery.’” The soaps helped P&G get through the Great Depression. When radio gave way to television, the soaps easily made the jump.

The soap operas came to dominate daytime television. Soaps were “once considered the stable revenue generator of the broadcast television model: the consistently popular daytime staples that helped fund primetime experimentation,” Fast Company Expert Blogger Sam Ford said. But not anymore.

There were once a dozen soaps on the air. There are now just four. Ford wrote that many in the television industry feel those four on their last legs. I think the demise is inevitable.

Like medicine shows and Burma Shave Road Signs, soaps apparently just don’t move product anymore. And that is the ultimate aim of most television shows and other marketing mediums. If it doesn’t sell something, it isn’t going to stay around. The audiences went elsewhere for any number of reasons and the advertisers saw that.

In the case of soap operas, “Many may say it’s because the fans abandoned the genre,” Ford wrote. “The story you often hear from fans is that it’s because the shows lost their way and their interest. As soaps tried to battle over the dwindling daytime audience as if ‘soap opera fans’ were all fans of the genre more than fans of the show, little thought was put into a sustained effort to bring lapsed fans back.”

Does this sound familiar? Let’s look at what’s happening to some other mass media.

“The Audit Bureau showed that average weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent compared with the same six months last year,” the New York Times reported last October. “The decline last year was more than twice that, 10.6 percent, as newspapers struggled through the recession and more readers abandoned print copies for the Internet.” (emphasis mine.)

Just like in soap operas, the advertisers are going away. “Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2,” the Reuters blog MediaFile reported in September.

The same thing is happening in television advertising. “Advertisers are losing confidence in the medium,” respondents to the Association of National Advertisers/Forrester study of national advertisers said. The survey respondents said they have “a lack of confidence in TV ad effectiveness. Sixty-two percent of respondents think that TV ads have become less effective in the past two years.”

So, where are these advertisers going? You know the answer – they are heading to the Internet, of which social media is a part. I could fill this blog with the statistics – 740 million Facebook users, 100 million-plus Linkedin members, Flickr now hosts more than five million images and so on.

Mashable predicts that in 2011, $3.08 billion will be spent on social media in the United States.

“That’s a 55% increase over the $1.99 billion U.S. advertisers reportedly spent on social networking sites in 2010, and nearly 11% of what they are expected to spend on all online advertising in the U.S. in 2011, eMarketer says,” Mashable reported. “Worldwide spending on social networks is expected to rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, approximately 8.7% of the total amount advertisers are predicted to spend online in 2011.”

Online advertising, which includes social media, is starting to snowball, the Economist reported. “Global spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year, according to ZenithOptima, an ad agency,” the Economist said. “This will be led by online advertising which will increase by 16%.”

Look at the Economist chart below. Online advertising is the largest, but it’s the fastest growing.

Chart courtesy of The Economist

So like medicine shows, Burma Shave Road Signs and now soap operas, conventional marketing is slowly going away. It will take some time, but just like those other things, it will happen.

Doing branding so it’s effective means melding traditional media, public relations and social media. Using just one of those methods might be effective in creating a brand. While there are never any guarantees, using the three methods as a trio greatly increases the chances that your product will resonate with potential customers.

Remember, a brand does not exist until it is fixed in a customers mind. Until then it is just something up shelf space.

So, what do you to meld the three? Well, the first thing is to sit down with the client and discuss their goals. Then take a deep breath and do that client sanity check I have talked about. One you have realistic goals, write a plan.

This is what I do. I sit down with a client and talk. We hammer out what is unique about the product or the client themselves. This is important for doing traditional media. You need a hook, something that will make a journalist take interest in the story.

Make no mistake; traditional media should still be in the mix. By that I mean free media. There is no need to buy an ad in a publication or spend thousands of dollars for a broadcast. Those efforts rarely, if ever, resonate with a consumer anymore. Yes, there was a time when they did, but there was also a time when people had to start their car with a crank.

If you convince a journalist to write or broadcast a story about a product, that is a huge endorsement. I think print journalism still has come cachet with consumers, especially those over 50. Yes, print is dying, but it’s not dead yet.

The same goes for broadcast, only more so. With the rise of DVRs, fewer and fewer people are watching commercials. But every study I have seen shows they are still watching local news. A piece of local news is another good way to build a brand. Most local news shows still have credibility.

Of course, that is only leg of the marketing stool. Social media has to be part of the plan – in fact it should lead the plan. The tools are many and should be used in tandem with traditional marketing methods.

I usually start my clients out with blogging. Every study I’ve ever read shows blogging is the best way to build credibility. Remember, a blog is not a sales document. It is a way to build credibility. No one is going to think a product is credible if the company making it is not viewed that way.

What a blog is a way to demonstrate expertise and ability. No one likes it when a company thumps its own chest. What readers do like is when a blog provides answers to questions or solutions to problems or just general knowledge.

A blog is also good for monitoring what customers think. I know I continually hammer on this point, but you want to hear both the good and the bad comments. The good can be used to help build the brand; the bad can help correct mistakes.

Facebook pages can be used the same way. Twitter is a billboard that allows you to tell people wants going on with your product. YouTube is invaluable for actually showing people what a product does.

Then there are such things as trade shows, samples and all that other good stuff. I could write a complete blog on each of these items. But enough for now.

Next week I want to talk about once cutting edge marketing vehicles that no longer work.

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

The method for turning a product into a brand is a bit like the old alchemist’s dream of turning lead into gold. Expect that converting a widget into THE WIDGET is a process that actually works.

Still, as I said last week, making that conversion is as much an art as it is a science. It involves mixing the hard sciences of research, planning, and design with the art of marketing. And make no mistake, good marketing is an art.

When I first got involved in marketing 10 years ago, I was told the rule was that public relations created a brand and advertising maintained it. It was usually a fairly long process. And although does happen sometimes, an established brand rarely goes away. There were exceptions obviously – the Ford Edsel comes to mind.

Social media has changed all of that. While it is still takes awhile to build a brand, social media can destroy a brand faster than you can say “United Breaks Guitars.”

So what has to be done in this era of social media to create a brand and make it stick in a consumer’s mind as something they need to have?

To be a successful brand, a product not only has to be different, but it has to have value in the consumer’s mind. A brand has to standout from all of the various messages a consumer it hit with. It has to convince a consumer that it will provide quality, it will be dependable and it has value. It has to convince a consumer that this product is the one which to spend money.

The obvious thing is that the campaign starts with a great product. Generally, that’s the foundation of a branding campaign. However, to this day I do not understand how the pet rock ever got popular. Sometimes there is just no accounting for taste.

Now, remember a brand does not exist until it is fixed the consumer’s mind. Until a consumer assigns value to the product and decides its different from other products, there is no brand. So the key is to convince the consumer to see the value in the product.

The product needs to be defined by what makes it unique. The brand needs to not only sell itself by what it does, but it needs to resonate emotionally with a potential customer. In addition, the product has to be able to demonstrate it delivers consistently better performance than its competitors.

That brand message has to be consistent. A lot of brands lose their mojo when for some reason; someone decides to change the messaging. All that does is confuse consumers. Confused consumers go someplace else to fulfill their needs.

The three key points of branding are:

• There needs to be a central point from which the brand flows. Think about Apple Inc. – all of its marketing focuses on creating a digital lifestyle.
• Any slogan has to agree with the central branding point. Think about the Apple IPad slogan: “Thinner. Lighter. Faster. Facetime. Smart Covers. 10 Hour Battery.” It dovetails extremely with Apple’s central branding point.
• The campaign has to define the product’s personality. Again, think about Apple. Go to any of its product’s websites. The same message resonates over and over – its products help you create a cutting edge digital lifestyle.

This where social media makes things better, and at the same, makes things a lot more dangerous. Social media can build a brand faster than any other method. But it can also destroy a brand faster than any other method.

I will talk about that next week.

That is something that often trips a client up. To someone who has been working at a company, or created a product, the brand is fixed and immutable. After all they reason, they know what they created. That’s well and good for them, but to the ultimate consumer that brand doesn’t exist.

While a product is a physical thing, its brand is not. As a speaker in class I am taking said the other night: “a brand doesn’t exist until it is fixed in a customer’s mind.”

A question I have started asking clients after hearing several speakers make this point is: “why would a customer want to buy your product?” Not why you want them to buy it, but why they should want it?

What a marketing agency has to do is create a consistent message about the product. The message helps a company create its image, its brand. It is that branding that lures a customer into making a purchase.

An important point to this is that after that the initial shot, the message and the image always have to be in sync. If there is any kind of disconnect, consumers will notice and turn to another brand. Companies often destroy their brands when they stray from their core message.

Here are the test questions every marketing person should be asking about their brand messaging: “is it true, is it believable, is it unique?” I didn’t invent that test, but I like it so I am using it. What the marketing plan should is make a product something people want to talk about.

As Milwaukee marketing executive Kevin Brandt said: “if you say something entirely new, entirely different, people will pay money to listen.”

Here’s an example that illustrates the point. I grew up near Troy, N.Y., which when I was young was the home of Arrow shirts. The shirt manufacturer, Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. was an independent company until the 1980s.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a very strong brand was created around “The Arrow Collar Man.” According to Wikipedia “the Arrow Collar ads were a collaborative production of New York ad agency Calkins and Holden; Cluett, Peabody advertising director Charles Connolly; and commercial illustrator J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker’s model was his live-in companion, a Canadian named Charles Beach.

“Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1931 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received fan mail. President Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a “superb portrait of the common man.” He inspired a Broadway musical Helen of Troy in 1923.” The message kept resonating long after the actual campaign stopped.

The Arrow Collar Man

Skip forward about 35 years. When I was about five or six, my parents bought me my first suit. To go with it, we drove over to Cluett, Peabody’s headquarters in Troy to buy an Arrow shirt from their outlet store. It seems to me they had children’s sizes. That first dress shirt instilled in me a strong love of button-down shirts that continues to this day, but I digress.

That was the first of many trips to Troy for dress shirts. I must have been about 16 or so when I first noticed that Arrow wasn’t the only shirt label being sold at the outlet. Along one wall were shirts with labels that included such names Marshall Fields, Filenes, Woodward & Lothrop, Abraham & Strauss. I knew those were department store names. There were many other such labels.

I asked one of the workers there what the difference was between those shirts and the ones with the Arrow labels. If memory serves, he told he there wasn’t much. Maybe a slightly bigger or smaller collar, or a different shade of blue, but essentially the shirts were the same.

Yet, I couldn’t buy one. I had to have an Arrow shirt. There was something about that label, about that Arrow image, that I wanted and had to have. That brand spoke to me. The idea that I would ever look anything like the idealized Arrow man is laughable. Yet, I would only wear those shirts because they bestowed the image of a self-confident, successful man.

That image created at the beginning of the 20^th Century had carried through to the late 1960s. It made myself and thousands of other men want that shirt because of that brand image.

That’s the definition of brand positioning. A good marketing agency will work hard to establish a brand such as the Arrow shirt. Next week I will take you behind the curtains to show how its done. Although be warned, creating a brand is more of an art than a science.

The discount site Groupon ran a commercial during the American football championship game – the Super Bowl – Feb. 6 that appeared to start out as an appeal to help Tibet. It ended as an appeal to use Groupon’s service. Actor Timothy Hutton noted that while Tibet may be an oppressed country, a Tibetan restaurant in Chicago makes a great fish curry.

To me this a case of where a campaign was created in a vacuum with no thought of how the real world would react. Of what I have read of Groupon, its management and employees are 20 and 30-somethings. I think they, along the creatives at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, found the idea hilarious. But there should have been some adult supervision. This stab at humor ended up costing Groupon a lot of good will and might have opened the door for its competitors. They went for edgy and ended up cutting themselves.

It was so controversial that Chicago-based Groupon pulled it on Friday, Feb. 11.

“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted,” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wrote in the company’s blog. “We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.”

This brings to mind that cliche about closing the barn door and the horse. I do give Mason points for taking the blame. Many CEOs wouldn’t do that.

To me, the commercial was at best juvenile and at worst offensive. Watch it yourself and see what you think.

Groupon\’s Tibet Commercial

(Full disclosure: I am Groupon member and user. I was an early adopter.)

Groupon ran two other commercials: one about saving the whales and one about saving the rainforest. Although those two were also spoofs, neither appears to have raised the public’s ire like the Tibet commercial.

The Net lit up almost immediately with criticism. Twitter users called it tacky, vulgar, detestable and other things I cannot use if I want this blog read in offices. Articles in various marketing publications condemned as a wrong-footed move for a company that until now has had a misstep.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago marketing company Alterian, which measures social media activity around Super Bowl advertisers, found that Groupon had the most mentions of every advertiser, but ranked last in sentiment on Alterian’s index.

“Groupon far and away had the most negative conversations relative to its (total) number of conversations,” Scott Briggs, who headed Alterian’s study, told the Tribune.

An AdWeek online column headline called the spot “Bad Taste, Pure and Simple.”

Dallas, Texas agency Team MutualMind and students from the Temerlin  Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University worked together to monitor the social media buzz for 52 advertisements aired during Super Bowl XLV. Their analysis found that the Groupon commercial was the most disliked of the commercials it analyzed. It was mentioned on social media sites 25,421 times. Of those mentions, 54.9 percent were negative, while 13.8 percent were positive. Presumably the remaining 31.3 percent were neutral.

According to published reports, Groupon intended the campaign to be a send-up of the pompous, self-important public service ads that run on television. More importantly, the company said it was actually trying to raise awareness for important causes.

There were defenders of the ad. I myself got involved in a very spirited debate on Linkedin in which a defender said: “The reason this campaign may have hurt Groupon has very little to do with Groupon and more to do with folks who didn’t get the joke. That is again, on them.

“Groupon was very effective in brand recognition and building awareness and resonating with those who did get it. That’s a win. That some news outlets weren’t informed and missed the point is rather sad imo, because I personally get offended more by the fact that so many are more concerned about an ad than Tibet. That’s the point.”

MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell also strongly defended the commercial. You can watch what he had to say here.

However, I do have to take issue with something O’Donnell said. He noted that Groupon gave over two-thirds of the commercial over to trying to tell people about Tibet. Well VW gave two-thirds of its time to Star Wars, but I don’t VW was trying to tout the movie.

The argument was made to me that any publicity is good publicity. Balderdash. I would never want to walk into a client meeting and tell the client: “hey guess what. We are the most mentioned campaign on the web. Everybody hates us, but look at all the mentions.” You think Toyota was thrilled by all the publicity it got last year?

This commercial was so off, it even details wrong. Tibetans don’t make or eat fish curry. According to the New York Times, the purported Tibetan mountain used in the commercial is in India, not Tibet. I mean, come on, if the details are wrong, why should I believe anything else about the commercial?

I think Groupon made a huge mistake. I want to know what you think. Please make a comment. I will do a follow-up blog if I get enough comments.

I have to say that as criteria for buying a personal hygiene product, knowing that the manufacturer  sponsors concerts is not even on the list. I tend to select the brands that perform the best according to my needs.

As I was taking the survey, I started thinking about companies that sponsor concerts or buy stadium-naming rights or plaster their names all over race cars. I know the theory is that potential customers will buy a product because of the company sponsorship. Frankly, I don’t buy it – figuratively or literally.

As an aside, I have to again laud my Green Bay Packers. They have played in Lambeau Field since 1957. They still play in Lambeau Field. There is no Lambeau Field sponsored by Acme Meatpacking. The Packers will not allow their stadium to be sullied by some company seeking to market its products. Ditto for the New York Yankees.

I think social media has changed consumers’ attitudes. Companies have, for the most part, learned they have to sell a quality product. If they don’t, the Internet will rise up and slap them down. It doesn’t matter whether the logo is plastered on the side of a race car.

I think the companies who spend some of their money on sponsorships are, for the most part, wasting their money.

There is an exception to that though. If I see a company supporting a cause I agree with, I am more likely to consider their product. My wife and I back a number of charitable organizations, including the American Diabetes Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. If I see a company contributing to those organizations, I will take a look at what they are selling.

Even then, I will take the time to check the company out. There are companies that will make charitable contributions as a way to hide their real image. Tobacco companies, as an example, can make all the contributions they want, I will never buy their products.

Which brings me to another point. I will sometimes not buy a product because of something the company has endorsed. I am not going to discuss my beliefs here. But if a company endorses something I feel is morally wrong, I am not going to buy their product.

Frankly, I think it would be a lot smarter if companies used their endorsement dollars to make products. They would probably make a lot more money that way.

I want to give a huge thanks to Heather Asiyanbi, a Milwaukee-area writer who generously has given her time to become my editor. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her work.

A cherished belief of mine about the Internet was crushed yesterday, making me rethink the whole idea of search engine optimization. Let me explain.

I have always encouraged my clients to make sure their customers have a place to comment on the client’s products. It makes sense for a lot of reasons, including the most important – Google rankings. The higher a Google ranking, the easier it is for a potential customer to find one of my clients.

Now, I always thought it was the good comments that drove a customer’s Google rankings. After all, it is illogical to think the bad comments would influence page rankings. Why would Google allow a company with terrible customer ratings to dominate the rankings? If you had a bad experience with a store, you certainly wouldn’t send a friend there.

Well, apparently Google is not so discerning. A Brooklyn-based company known as DecorMyEyes.com has some of the worst customer rankings I have ever seen. Yet it shows up on the first page of a Google search for eyeglasses.

As reported Nov. 26^th by The New York Times’ David Segal, company owner Vitaly Borker discovered that it really doesn’t matter what is said about a company. All that matters is that something is said.

In response to the negative comments, Segal said Borker wrote a blog post using a pseudonym. He thumbed his nose at all of his dissatisfied customers.

“’Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,’”the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

“It’s all part of a sales strategy,” he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.’”

That burst my bubble, I must say. I always thought Google, and other search engines, looked for the positive results when considering rankings. I assumed that the wizards at Google had created an algorithm that considered the tenor of comments.

As Segal wrote: Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works,” Borker told Segal. “No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

This bothers me. What this appears to mean is no matter what one posts about a retailer, it helps them if they know how to game the system.

There is an old adage from the early days of public relations that goes, “any publicity is good publicity.” The other is, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you get my name right.”

Those are both from public relations’ dark ages – the days of press agents, three martini lunches, and sometimes out-and out-lies. I had hoped we had moved beyond all of that. This kind of thing could destroy consumer confidence in web searches. That is not good for any reputable company that relies on the web.

I hope Google steps up and figures out a way to deal with this.

I figured why this is – the people who create these campaigns work in the bubble a marketing agency can be. They are creating campaigns for three groups – the client, their supervisors, and they and their friends. It doesn’t matter none of those groups are often objective when it comes to a campaign. Those are the people who sign off on the idea, the plan and the execution.

The problem is that none of those people know how the intended consumers should be reached. The client is often dazzled how creative the campaign seems. The agency people have no other point of reference than their own. The research they do is designed to reinforce their own ideas.

Let me give you an example from another industry that I think proves the point.

When I first moved to Detroit in 1978, I was struck by how many miles of really good freeways the area had. Residents would boast that Detroit was second only to Los Angeles in multilane highway mileage. At the time, these were really well maintained roads. Potholes and other obstacles were rare occurrences. Maintenance was done late at night, so there were no traffic tie-ups during the day.

This was the environment in which U.S. car companies operated. I think it influenced the way they designed cars. Those cars were not designed for the typical American highway because the executives and designers drove on good roads everyday. The executive and designers lived in a bubble of their own making. They assumed that every road was like the ones they drove on each day. When consumers rejected those cars because they didn’t meet their needs, it took Detroit a long time to break out of that bubble.

I feel the same thing is true of a lot of marketers. They live in that bubble, or silo, or whatever you want to call it. They don’t understand that they are just looking in a mirror when they ask for input from the people around them.

I think this is why a lot of agencies simply ignore baby boomers. Even though my generation is large and still has some discretionary income, the average 29-year-old doesn’t know to market to us. Oh, they try, but they have no idea works for us. So, the campaign fails and no one wants to try again.

That’s one of the things I like about social media done well. It forces the campaign out into the real world. It is lot harder to stay in a bubble when people from the outside are popping it.

In your hotel that night you turn on the television. For the next three hours, you see political invective spewed of that electronic box. The ads you see tell you how bad the business climate is in that state – poor education, high crime, high taxes, lousy facilities, and a government that doesn’t care. You know it might not be true, but you figure why take the chance? So, you pack your bags and go looking for another state to locate your facility and the jobs it will bring.

Too far-fetched? I wonder.

I live in Wisconsin. We are one of the key states in the 2010 election cycle. Our governor’s office is open. Republican Scott Walker is slugging out with Democratic Tom Barrett. Our incumbent senator, Russ Feingold, is fighting it out with newcomer and businessman Ron Johnson. Plus, there are several key races for House seats and the state Legislature.

We in Wisconsin are being inundated with television advertising, most of it negative. Let’s leave aside the personal attacks the candidates are making on each other. I do have say that if these candidates were five-year-olds, they would be sent to their rooms for the tantrums they are throwing.

The majority of the rest of the advertising talks about how bad things are in the Badger state. Our taxes are too high, our healthcare costs too much, our education is system is falling apart, and there is too much government regulations. Both sides say if the other side is elected, Wisconsin has roughly the same change to prosper as the Titanic did to float after it hit that iceberg.

As I said, if you are a businessperson, would you put your company here after seeing those ads?

It bothers me when one of our own does this. If I am that businessman, I am going to tend to believe the people who live here. If they tell me things are bad, who I am to argue?

Plus, if you are like me, you are cynical about any elected official’s ability to accomplish anything. So why take the chance that things might get fixed?

What particularly frosts me is the outside groups coming in and ripping my state. These are groups run by people who cannot tell you why Wisconsin loves the Packers so much, or what the difference is between a six-month-old cheddar and a six-year-old cheddar. The closest they have ever come to the Dairy State is when they land at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to change planes.

They don’t care about Wisconsin, its business climate and what they might be doing to it. All they care about is winning. Once the election is over, they are going to forget about us until 2012.

Everyone involved in the election will justify their tactics by saying what they did is for the greater good. They remind me of the Army officer during the Vietnam War who was quoted as saying “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

To me, Martin shows that he doesn’t understand social media when it calls “little more than the newest channel on the block.” Social media is not a channel; it is a whole new way of doing things. I think that’s the problem because advertising people such as Martin don’t understand that.

I could fill this blog with examples of how social media has supplanted and surpassed advertising as the premier method of marketing. Just look at the companies whose primary marketing efforts are through social media: the shoe company Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Pepsi and a host of others.

For advertising people, social media is a just another way to talk to consumers. It is not. It is a way for brands to talk with their consumers. As I always tell clients, there is a conversation going on about your brand. You should be part of that conversation, but it is going to happen whether you are in it or not. Advertising agencies think they can control that conversation. They cannot. It can be directed, but it cannot be controlled.

Martin argues “social media is the creation of stories, content, photos, videos, information and entertainment.” He says that it is difficult to create strategically sound, effective content. The people that can do that, he says, work for advertising agencies. I have to disagree. The average advertising agency employee is not equipped in either training or temperament to create the kind of things social media demands. They are used to writing six lines of punchy copy. They are not used to making a coherent argument for why one brand should be purchased.

There are numerous studies that show most people don’t believe traditional advertising. If people wanted to view advertisements, they would ask DVR manufacturers to program the devices do they didn’t skip commercials. Every time I talk to some who has just purchased a DVR, one of the things they rave about not having to watch commercials anymore.

A recent Harris poll found some interesting facts about television commercials. The study, as reported by the Center for Media Research, said that 75 percent of Americans have found a commercial on TV confusing. Twenty-one percent often find TV commercials confusing, while 55 percent say that commercials are not very often confusing. Just 14 percent say they never find TV commercials confusing,. Eleven percent do not watch TV commercials.

So, this is a situation where a third of the audience either is confused by commercials or never watches them. Only 14 percent are never confused by a commercial. That means that the message is getting through to the audience must of the time. Not a ringing endorsement of advertising.

“A commercial’s main focus needs to be selling a product or service,” the Center for Media Research reports that the study’s author says. “If consumers watching these commercials are unsure of that main focus, the marketers are doing something wrong. If the ad is confusing, the prospective consumer may dismiss that product from consideration.”

I don’t think I want the people who are not getting the message across to handle my social media.

Public relations people are the ones who understand how to create the kind of campaign that social media demands. PR practitioners know how to use pull marketing, which is the definition of social media.

Speaking as one who has spent approximately a decade in public relations, I can tell you we understand that we have to talk with consumers, not at them. Prior to switching into public relations, I was a working reporter for over two decades. You learn fast in journalism you cannot make people read any story just because you think it is important. You have to give them reasons to do so.

I also always tell clients that consumers control their brand. Social media acknowledges that and uses it to the client’s advantage. Today’s consumers hate being pandered to or coerced. That’s what advertising tries to do. Social media on the other hand gives people reasons to buy a product, but realizes the final decision is up to them.

That goes back to public relations. Traditional public relations is all about creating content that people want to read. A public relations person has to convince a reporter to do a story, or attend an event. Public relations people are used to creating content that people want to read. The idea is to make the consumer want to engage with the brand.

It is not that much of leap from public relations to social media. The tools are different, but the idea is the same. Public relations is where social media should reside.

I received an email Tuesday from Kiehl’s, the New York City-based hair and skin product company. In exchange for reviewing one of the company’s products, Kiehl’s will give the reviewer two of the company’s most popular products. One does have to spend $35 to get the freebies. However, it is very easy to spend $35 at their website.

That Kiehl’s is soliciting products reviews to me is a good thing. It shows its leadership wants to know what customers are thinking. It means the executives understand that positive reviews and word-of-mouth are the best marketing tools. That says that this is a company that knows its needs to jump into the social media stream.

Many companies are doing what Kiehl’s is doing. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of companies using social media to reach out. As I have said before the adoption of social media is like a snowball rolling a mountain. At first, it is just a baseball-sized piece of snow that’s barely noticeable against the background. But it gathers both speed and more and more snow as it moves. Soon it is an avalanche.

I should note that I am a longtime Kiehl’s customer. My wife and I use many of their products. I have no contact with the company other than being a customer.

The request of reviews struck me as very interesting. The company’s leaders have to know that not all the reviews are going to be positive. I think it shows courage and foresight to do that. No company pleases all of its customers all of the time. I am curious to see how Kiehl’s handles the negative comments.

If the company’s leaders are smart, they will use the information gathered from the negative reviews to improve on whatever customers don’t like. I always tell clients the negative comments are as important that the positive ones.

Positive comments pull in potential customers. Those comments endorse a decision a potential customer makes to buy a product. Numerous studies have shown that third-party endorsements are the most powerful lure for making sales.

Negative comments are important because it tells a company what it is doing wrong. Prior to social media often the only a company knew a campaign was wrong-footed is when it didn’t get the results it expected. It and its agency might have created a multi-million dollar campaign. Focus groups might have said it was a great campaign. But it fell flat on its face and cost the company millions in lost sales.

As a note, I do not like focus groups. I have never believed accurate information can be gleamed from six or eight people sitting in room eating donuts and drinking coffee. It is an artificial environment. One person can dominate the room and the research results.

That’s why unsolicited comments are such so more valuable. They are generally honest opinions from real customers. So if something is wrong, they will not be afraid to say it.

The value to a company is that it gives a change course during the campaign. The mistakes can be corrected. Correcting those mistakes shows a company cares about its customers. Customers will generally return the feeling and buy more products.

That’s why comments are important. Companies and customers can share the love.

I object to using that line for two reasons: the late Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein coined one the phrase. That’s like quoting Hitler in an ad. Two, it’s just lazy writing. Rather than come up with something original, the copywriter fell back on something easy. Of course, the client approved the script. But, that’s no excuse.

Using clichés is never acceptable in my book – except in an ad that is deliberate satire. On that matter, I beg you if you are creative not to try satire unless your name is John Stewart or Jonathan Swift. Most people are just not any good at it.

Getting back to clichés, there are so many phrases that shouldn’t be used; yet they are. Let’s run down a few:

• “To be perfectly honest – so you have perfected honesty. What imperfect honesty, lying?
• Pushing the envelope – that phrase originally came from test pilots, who were pushing the limits of their planes. It meant they could die if something went wrong. That is not how that phrase is used now. You really thinking you are going to die with the new campaign?
• For the record – a legal phrase that originally meant something to be entered into the court record. I have heard and read this in too many campaigns. Is this campaign meeting some kind of legal requirement?
• World famous – I see this on restaurants a lot. So, the next time I am in Dublin, can I ask what they think of Joe’s Hot Dogs?
• Fantastic and amazing – Usually used when describing some new product, such as a cleaning soap. I got news for all of you, chemically all soap is exactly the same. I am rarely amazed by ketchup or beer bottles.
• Prices will never be this low again – yeah, until the next sale. That one is a favorite of car dealers. While I am the subject of car dealers, why do they always shout? Why would I buy anything from anyone who shouts at me?
• We always give 110 percent – mathematically impossible.

I could go on, but I am curious what clichés you crazy. If I get enough responses, I will publish them.

Facebook is doing the same thing, although in a much less violent way obviously. The difference between the Borg and Facebook is that people want to join Facebook. It is remaking the way we interact with our fellow human beings. It has become the key site for any advertiser or marketing company that wants to build or extend a brand.

(Note to Trek Fans: I do not want to hear from you about the nuances of the series. I don’t care.)

I was reminded of the other day when I received the latest numbers on Facebook’s penetration of the wired world. Facebook now has 512 million followers in 212 countries, according to the Sept. 22 issue of World Internet Stats News. The News says that as of Aug. 31, there were approximately 1.9 billion Internet users on Earth. If you want to read the entire report, go here.

What makes Facebook’s assimilation of the Internet even more amazing is that the estimated 420 million Internet users in China cannot access the social media site. It has been banned in China since 2009.

So, the Earth’s estimated population is an estimated 6.84 billion people. Facebook is reaching just about 10 percent of it. There is nothing else in the world that reaches that many people on a continuous basis – with one exception. The World Cup soccer championship reaches over 700 million people during its run. But that only happens once every four years.

I think Internet Stats Editor Enrique De Argaez puts its best: “Mark Zuckerberg, without being a political leader and without planning to do so, has sparked the only true revolution taking place today in the world: the — Social Web Revolution –. The main characteristic of a revolution is a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving. This is precisely what has happened worldwide in the Internet due to his now famous Facebook network. More than 517 million persons in 212 different countries have joined the Facebook Social Web, in the surprisingly short period of time of six years.”

Argaez is the chief executive officer of the Bogota, Columbia-based Miniwatts Marketing Group.

Keep in mind that Zuckerberg just turned 26-years-old. If you want to know more about him, read this article from the New Yorker. I suspect it is more objective than the movie “Social Network” about Facebook that is scheduled to be released Oct. 1.

What Zuckerberg and company have done is create and grow the dominant social media application. Facebook has become the must place to be for social media marketing.

“The company has developed a potentially powerful kind of advertising that’s more personal—more “social,” in Facebook’s parlance—than anything that’s come before, Bloomberg Business Week reporter Brad Stone wrote in the magazine’s Sept. 22 issue. “Ads on the site sit on the far right of the page and are such a visual afterthought that most users never click them. These ads can evolve, though, from useless little billboards into content, migrating into casual conversations between friends, colleagues, and family members—exactly where advertisers have always sought to be.”

As Stone points out in his article, Facebook has nailed the essence of social media marketing: “Facebook’s promise to advertisers isn’t to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser’s brand in the user’s consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to ‘like’ the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.”

That’s the real key to social media. It is why I now tell my clients Facebook is where they need to be. They should use other sites, but without using Facebook, it is like trying paddle kayak with a spoon. It just makes sense.

You can follow me on Facebook at Jeffrey Cole.

In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address in 1933, he uttered that now famous phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” What he meant was that what keeping the economy from recovering from the greatest economic disaster in U.S. history was people’s inclination to hunker down.

Unfortunately, I see the same thing happening today, especially with US companies. They are afraid to do anything right now, especially spend money. Their fear is very specific. Publically traded companies only really want to do one thing – please Wall Street. I think that is one of the biggest problems in our country right now. I think it is what is holding us back.

My friends know this is a common rant with me. I think American business pays way too much attention to what some pimply-faced MBA/analyst has to say. How many company’s justify layoffs, or moving a factory by saying Wall Street demands it? Every state in the United States has seen this happen. If some analyst says a company should be make $1 share and it makes 99 cents a share, the stock price is pummeled. The Board of Directors and the CEO both talk about how cuts need to be made to make that $1 a share.

Now the company might be wildly profitable, but that doesn’t matter. It suddenly doesn’t want to spend any money or hire more workers because it has to make that Wall Street imposed goal. In my mind, it is a stupid way to do business.

That’s why three of my favorite companies are S.C. Johnson Wax, Jockey, and Kohler Corp. They are all privately held companies. They can do what needs to be done without having answer to some analyst 800 miles away. I wish more companies were like them.

I don’t know what’s going on in your state, but in Wisconsin, it’s election time. Since we Badgers are purple most of the time, every political party from the Greens to Tea Party wants to talk to us. (Maybe the Greens and Tea Party could merge and form the Green Tea Party. Healthy at least.)

I have to say for someone who has done marketing for a decade or so – and was a working reporter for two decades before that – I have never seen more terrible marketing campaigns. A five-year-old with a lemonade stand does a better job marketing their product than your average politician and his/her campaign staff.

“Advertising is essentially truthful, except political advertising, which … gets worse every year … (It’s) just the artful assembling of nominal facts into hideous, outrageous lies,” Adage Columnist Bob Garfield, as quoted on the PBS Frontline Show “The Persuaders.”

What amazes me is so many people believe those advertisements and information that comes from robocalls and information provided by the candidates themselves.

Here in Wisconsin, we have tight races for US Senate and Governor. As I said, we are generally a purple state. We are a contrary people. You can never be sure just which way we are going to lean. So, every election season we get bombarded with calls, fliers, and newspaper and television ads. Each side is trying to convince us that they are the solution to all their problems.

The ads usually run along these lines:

Attack ad – “Did you know that (fill in name here) proposed barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital? Well, call (fill in name here) and tell him/her you are opposed to barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital.”

Reply – “My opponent (fill in name here) says I proposed barbecuing puppies on the steps of the capital. Balderdash and poppycock!! Why my opponent has proposed eliminating child labor laws so that it is mandatory that every child over the age of three go to work.”

Of course, when a candidate appears in his or her own commercials, it goes something like this: “When Moses parted the Sea of Reeds, I was there. It was I who suggested the route the Israelites took through the Sinai. Re-elect/elect me and I will steer my constituents through the desert we are in currently in. I will lead you all to a land of milk and honey.”

I have a friend who is a veteran marketing and public relations practitioner. He is so good at it, he teaches it at the college level. He is also, I think, a conservative Republican. Yet, he told me the other day he turns the volume down every time a political commercial comes on the tube. He said they are so bad they make him cringe.

What amazes me is that research indicates those commercials work. And the more excited the commercial gets the viewer, the more effective it is.

“We know from lots of good geeky political science research that ads that are able to stimulate emotions are more likely to be effective,” University of Wisconsin – Madison Political Science Professor Kenneth Goldstein. Goldstein is a political advertising expert.

As I said, I just don’t get it. Of course, it just shows me that my hero, H.L. Mencken was right when he said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.

In giving a report on the state of one of the oldest franchises in the National Football League, Murphy stated the team was actively exploring using social media to stay in closer touch with its fan base.

At first, I was surprised. You have to understand there is no more fanatic fan base in all of sports than the Packer Nation. As a note, I am a proud member of that green and gold clad horde.

Before you start bringing up other teams and their fans, let me give you a few facts:

• According to the Packers’ website, the team has sold out 285 straight games at Lambeau Field – 269 regular season, 16 playoff – since 1959. Packer fans go to away games just to get a chance to see the team play in person.
• Heck, 20,000 or so people will show up to watch an outdoors practice.
• The Packers do not sell single game tickets. There is no need.
• Murphy said there are approximately 80,000 people on the season ticket waiting list. According to former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, an average of 70 people a year give up their tickets. Tickets are usually handed down through the generations. You do the math on how long it will take to cut that season ticket list down.

So, why would a team who is not just in touch with its fans, but seemingly joined at the hip with them, consider jumping into the social media pool? Because like any other small business, the team knows that it cannot rely on what has worked to keep working.

Yes, the Packers are small business in the NFL sense. Their home base is the 257^th largest city in the United States. Yes, they are the state of Wisconsin’s team. Even adding the people who live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, those people in Northern Illinois who decide to root for the Pack and those from Iowa who aren’t Viking’s fans – the Packers have a potential fan base of around six or seven million people. I think there are that many people trying to get through New York City’s Lincoln tunnel on a Friday night.

Plus those fans are changing.

“My kids don’t read a newspaper,” Murphy noted. Most under 30s do not. So while the older of those in Packer nation still read print media, the younger do not Murphy clearly knows he needs to go where the fans are. For in this time of decreasing brand loyalty and fickle fans, no smart company is going to take anything for granted.

So rather than rely on Wisconsin’s newspapers and television stations, the team is turning to channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

There are several lessons to be learned, but I think the major one is that the Packers are being pre-emptive. They are morphing their marketing efforts before there’s a problem. It is a lesson all businesses should learn.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when I do, I pay close attention to the advertisements. As a marketer, I like to see what major companies are doing to drum up business. Granted, I think social media would be far more effective, but a lot of companies still feel comfortable with what they view as the tried and true.

Watching commercials always reminds me of a major reason reasons I don’t like traditional advertising. The copywriters and producers constantly use stereotypes and half-truths to make a point. It is a lazy way to make a point. As times, those ads can be downright insulting.

As an example, Kellogg’s has been running a commercial entitled on YouTube “Fruit Loops Doctor Commercial 2009.” The commercial has a small boy playing the doctor, a small girl playing the nurse, and a small boy as a patient.

The commercial claims Fruit Loops can be good for you because it now contains fiber. That claim alone I find dubious. According to Kellogg’s, a typical serving contains three grams of fiber. The American Dietetic Association says children under 12 should be consuming at least an amount of fiber equal to their age plus three. There are a lot better ways for a child to get enough fiber. Fruit and vegetables come to mind.

In addition, the first ingredient listed for Fruit Loops is sugar, 12 grams in a typical serving. The American Heart Association says that’s the amount of sugar a child should consume in an entire day. Somehow, the ad doesn’t mention that.

What really frosts me though are the gender stereotypes. As I said, the doctor is male, the nurse is female. According to the May 6, 2010 New York Times, almost half of medical students are women. The last number I could find – from 2006 – said 33 percent of practicing physicians are women. So why did Kellogg’s or their agency decide the doctor had to be a woman?

Plus, since women make most grocery buying decisions, wouldn’t it be logical to show a sympathetic character?

As for another stereotypes, AT&T has been running a commercial showing a family that has just signed up for AT&T’s Internet service. With that service comes Wi-Fi. Only Dad doesn’t seem to understand how Wi-Fi works. He keeps asking for a cord to connect to the Internet.  He is told the cord is invisible. He asks for his own invisible cable. I mean, come on.

It always bothers me when a campaign singles out a parent – be it mother or father – to ridicule. Why make fun of anybody?

As for the dad in this commercial – I don’t anyone who calls a USB cable a cord. Second, anyone using the Internet on consistent basis must know what Wi-Fi is. What kind of a dolt is this dad?

To me, this kind of commercial is just a very lazy way of doing things. And, no is it not satire. It is just a lack of creativity.

Why it is every time I turn on the television or listen to the radio, some company is trying to scare me into buying their product? Instead of touting the benefits of their offering, they tell me I will be facing dire consequences if I don’t purchase what they’re selling.

Now, I don’t watch a lot of television, but there are some shows I like. I am excluding watching sports. That’s a whole another issue. As a loyal Milwaukee Brewers, New York Yankees and Green Bay Packer fan, I try to watch as many of their games as possible.

Of course, watching television means accepting the advertising that comes with it. I don’t have a problem with that. It is how the broadcast networks can afford to provide those shows. I love PBS, but I am not naïve enough to think every network could hold pledge drives to keep themselves on the air.

What I don’t like are ads such as the one General Motors runs for its OnStar® system. Briefly, OnStar® is an “in-vehicle security, communications, and diagnostics system” GM puts in more than 50 of its models. It notifies an operator when there has been accident. It can also be used to track and shut down a stolen car and be used for diagnostic purposes.

In the television commercials, former NFL player Howie Long shows a “skeptical” customer how only OnStar® will help him in the event of an accident. The radio commercials are lot more graphic. The commercials play out scenarios where someone has been in accident and because of OnStar®, they are saved. Or a stolen car is found because of OnStar®.

H & R Block, the tax preparers, did something similar during tax season. At least one commercial talked about how there were something like over 1,000 changes made to the U.S. Tax Code. The narrator said how people should have H & R Block prepare their returns because of those changes. It intimated if you didn’t go there, you would be in trouble.

To deal with the last example first, there might have been over 1,000 changes to the tax code. But, I am willing to bet most of them were not to the personal income tax section of the code. What most people don’t realize is lot of laws are changed every year for many reasons, often very minor ones such as misplaced period or a word out of place.

Why should creating even more anxiety over something that has sweating already be a marketing technique?

As for GM, to me those ads are almost disingenuous. Yes, it is true OnStar® would help you. But, so would a lot of other new cars’ systems. Almost every car built today has Blue Tooth capability. Ford, for instance, has a hands free system in its cars. I was in a Lexus the other day that had the same thing. The systems allow a cell phone to be locked in to a cradle, so it would not go flying in an accident. A call could be made after an accident.

However, I have yet to see either Ford or Toyota, or other car companies, talk about how you need that Blue Tooth system in case of accident.

Plus, I am not sure I want people to be able to find me when I am in my car. Maybe I have read George Orwell’s “1984” one too many times, but I don’t like the idea of someone else being able to track my car. I don’t want someone else, no matter how benevolent they are now, to have the power to stop my car.

Frankly, in both cases here, and all of the other companies that do the same thing, I would rather hear about the product’s features and cost. I don’t want to think I end facing prison for tax evasion, or left to die an accident. That is just not the way I want to be approached.

I would like to thank the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater Public Relations Student Society of America for inviting me to speak April 24^th. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There were a lot of very bright students from UW-Whitewater, UW-Lacrosse, UW-Stephens Point and UW-Oshkosh at the PRSSA regional meeting. Thanks again.



Did you ever notice how hard businesses work to attract new business? Yet, once they make the sale, they act like a two-year-old. They lose interest and move on to what looks like another shiny opportunity. They only notice the old sale when some other company tries to take the customer away. The two-year-old mentally kicks again. They suddenly want to keep what they ignored because someone else wants it.

The problem with being reactive is that it’s usually too late. A customer ignored is usually a customer lost.

That has always struck me as a strange way to do business. Yet, I see it all the time.

I am reading a book called “Flip The Funnel. How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones” by Joseph Jaffe, president and chief interrupter (a title I love, by the way) of the Long Island-based consulting firm crayon. It lays out the reasons why more efforts should be focused on keeping existing customers.

As Jaffe says in the book: “why – if our customers are the lifeblood of our business – are we not relatively investing in them according?”

Jaffe cited a number of examples of why marketing to existing companies is extremely important, but I will give one. In 2008, customers who made more than three purchases from online shoe retailer Zappos accounted for 50.2 percent of the company’s business. In comparison, those people who only ever made one purchase accounted for 28.6 percent of sales. The remaining 21.2 percent of sales came from those who made two or three purchases.

So, a little more than half of the company’s business came from loyal, committed customers. Now, Zappos works hard to serve to that group of people. As they should – these people are the company’s most reliable revenue stream.

According to the website 1000ventures.com:

• Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers.
• A two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.
• The average company loses 10 percent of its customers each year
• A five percent reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125 percent, depending on the industry.
• The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

Yet, despite all of those facts, most companies work harder to attract new customers than they do to keep the ones they have. I have to say marketing agencies are part of the problem. When was the last time you read about an agency touting its ability to hang onto existing customers?

Yes, it is important to attract new business. But, I would argue that it is more important to hold onto the business your company already has. As Jaffe points out, churning business is a bad thing.

That churn forces companies to focus too much energy on replacing lost business. It takes less energy and effort to hold onto an existing customer than it does to attract a new one. The energy used to attract new business could be better used coming up with new ways to satisfy existing customers. After all, happy customers don’t leave.

Which brings me to another point. It is an axiom in the agency business that a client will want to shift its a business when a new marketing manager takes over. I suspect the same axiom holds true in other businesses, although it might when a new buyer takes over or when management changes. The argument goes that the new executive at the client will like some other agency and will make a switch for that reason alone. I have seen a lot of companies that just give up when there’s a change in the client’s executive team changes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The mindset needs to change.  Social media is an excellent way to maintain a brand and hence hold onto clients. In the coming weeks, I will be talking about some companies that do customer retention very well. I am always looking for examples. Let me know which companies you think do it well and how they do it.  If you have examples, I would like those too.



Okay, social media scares many C-suite people. That’s no surprise. Because if you are honest when you present, you should make them realize that using social media means acknowledging they don’t have complete control of their brand. Of course, they never really did. A brand’s identity is determined in the marketplace. It’s what consumers think – be they business-to-business or business-to-consumer – that defines a brand

It is hard for most senior executive to admit they really never had control of their brand. Facing that means acknowledging that all the money spent on marketing and advertising did not provide a failsafe way to ensure happy consumers and ever increasing sales.

Social Media will allow them to listen to what consumers are saying

Social media won’t do that either. However, unlike advertising, it doesn’t make that promise. What it does promise is a way to listen into and influence the conversation that is already taking place about a company or a brand. The odds are far better that there will be a positive outcome if a company knows what is being said.

Some executives will respond that they already know what their customers are thinking. After all, people will send emails when they have a complaint. That’s true. But remember, a person who is so upset that they are motivated to send an email is usually not representative of the customer base. Blog and Twitter comments will provide a far more accurate picture of what people are thinking.

Also unlike traditional marketing, those using social media want to hear the negative comments. How else does one get better unless one knows what the problems are? The good thing about this method it is much more inclusive. Rather than relying a focus group or a marketing study, a company has opened up its comments to entire customer base. That is much more representative of what’s actually happening.

How does one listen to these conversations? By creating a Twitter brand, by blogging, by having a Facebook page and a LinkedIn group. In addition, videos posted on YouTube are good. In each of these cases, and in other social media applications, you are looking for people to comment. It is from those comments that you will find what people are thinking.

Eventually what you to do is convert those commenter’s into fans and eventually evangelists for your brand. I will talk about how to do that in another post. But, I have just told you the first step.

Social Media takes time

After you describe all of this, the next objection is going to arise – social media takes time. Writing a blog, maintaining a fan page on Facebook, Tweeting and responding to Tweets, answering questions on LinkedIn, posting videos and monitoring and responding to comments are not something that can be done in an hour once a week.

These are many executives who used to their agency doing all the work. All they have to do is approve the campaign and make sure the agency has access to whomever it needs to work with at the company. It is a kind of “fire and forget” strategy. Now, you are asking them to become an active part of their own marketing effort.

Remember, social media is not a tactic or a strategy. It is an entirely new way of marketing. It requires a commitment to stick with it. Nothing turns off a potential customer more than sporadic, unscheduled use of social media. Blogs especially have to be posted on a specific schedule. Nothing kills a blog following faster than making it hard to find. The same thing applies to a Facebook fan page or a YouTube video channel.

This is, of course, your opportunity. You are there to teach them about social media and maintain their accounts. You are the solution to their problems of time management. It why they will hire you.

One note though – do not, ever, write your client’s blog yourself. You can edit it; you can proofread it, but don’t write it. That’s dishonest. PR firms have gotten into trouble for doing things like that. Tweeting for them is fine, as is maintaining the Facebook page. Just don’t be a ghostwriter. You want those thoughts about the company or product to come from someone who really knows it. Plus, consumers react badly when they perceive something isn’t what it purports to be.

There is more to do on social media. I will discuss the most important element next week. Stay tuned.

I work from a home office.

That’s good because it cuts way down on costs, my commute takes about 30 seconds, and I don’t have to share the bathroom with anyone other than my smarter half. It’s bad because there are way too many distractions in my house.

One of those is the television. I am a news junkie, so I flip on the television on during the day to see what’s happening in the world. I haven’t been a working reporter for almost a decade, but I am still hooked on current events.

So the other day I turn on the tube only to see a commercial for denture adhesive. Three women of a certain age were singing about the joys of this adhesive to the tune of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love.”

My first thought was WTF?!?! I am sure Phil and Don Everly were not thinking about loose teeth when they were recorded the song in 1957.  (I was three-years-old when the song came out. My late older brother was big fan of the duo, so I heard it a lot.)

“Bye Bye Love” was one of those bouncy little pop ballads that were so prevalent in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Hearing that song made me realize that the industry I am in is co-opting my formative years. I don’t like it.

For those of you who are not Baby Boomers, I realize we get pretty boring rhapsodizing about how great things were 40-years-ago. But, we had to listen to my parents stories about their generation. Now it’s your turn to listen to us.

You have to remember how controversial rock was in the ‘50s and ‘60s. When Elvis appeared for the first time on Ed Sullivan, they only showed him from the waist up. It was thought way too scandalous to show his gyrations. Seems a little tame now when you think about Madonna kissing Brittany Spears or Adam Lambert going all bi-sexual on national television. That’s one of the things we love about it. It was considered untouchable by anybody but us damned hippie kids.

Abbie Hoffman - the man who predicted our music would be co-opted.

I don’t think Steppenwolf would have been allowed to play “Magic Carpet Ride” on broadcast television forty years ago. After all, whether it is actually true or not, we always assumed the song was about getting high. People sang about such things in the ‘60s.

So, I Google the song and discover Wendy’s used a version of it in a commercial. Well, I suppose that marriage of music and marketing kind of works. You know, munchies ….

In fact, that Google search turned up three pages on About.com of popular songs used in commercials. What used to be the anthems of rebellion are now background music for selling hamburgers and cars.

Excuse me, but I have to say it: Bummer Dude!

Well, the late Abbie Hoffman did predict this was going to happen – I think in his opus “Steal This Book.” (Which I did, but then someone stole from me. It’s what Hoffman wanted to happen, but I digress.) The point he made was that eventually society co-opts everything. Oh, well, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Although I have yet to hear any commercial using the lyrics from John Lennon’s song New York City:

Standing on the corner

Just me and Yoko Ono

We was waiting for Jerry to land

Up come a man with a guitar in his hand

Singing, “Have a marijuana if you can”

His name was David Peel

And we found that he was real

He sang, “The Pope smokes dope every day”

Up come a policeman shoved us up the street

Singing, “Power to the people today!”

So, maybe there are some corners that are still untouchable.

There has been a lot of debate in the blogosphere lately about whether television is still a viable place for companies to hawk their wares. Those who argue old school marketing methods aren’t going anywhere for a long time say television is still a great place to set up a booth. Those who have imbibed the social media wine argue just the opposite – that television is as much a dinosaur as print.

Well, I think that for a time, both sides are right. However, if the sun isn’t yet setting on television for marketing, it is late afternoon. Why you ask?

A lot of eyes still watch the television screen

Well, let’s consider the latest report from Nielsen. In comparing American television viewership, the research service found that overall television viewership had risen by 1.9 percent to 153:27 hours a month in the first quarter of 2009. That’s an average of just over five hours a day.

(Editor’s note: Who has five hours a day to watch television? That’s 35 hours a week. Assume people work about 45 hours a week, spend another 10 hours commuting, and sleep 56 hours a week, that leaves 22 hours a week, or three hours a day, to get everything else done. No wonder most Americans look so bleary-eyed.)

According to Nielsen, approximately 284 million Americans watched television in the first quarter of last year. That number increased by 1.2 percent over the same period in 2008. For analysis purposes, that number was flat.

Still, that means approximately 80 percent of the American population was watching television. If I were marketing something, I think I would consider using television as part of the campaign – depending on the age of the consumer I wanted to reach.

TiVo and DVRs are changing the game

The Nielsen report found something else that is very interesting – approximately 79 million Americans watched “time-shifted” television. In other words, they recorded a show to watch later. They spent about eight hours a month doing that – a 37 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008.

Nielsen also found that “online video grew 13 percent in Q1 2009, driven by both strong brand marketing and large media events including the Presidential inauguration, the Super Bowl and March Madness. With broadband levels increasing in the U.S., online video audiences will continue to grow as consumers begin to upgrade their PCs to support increased video consumption. Mobile video viewing (on smart phones) has grown a significant 52 percent from the previous year, up to 13.4 million Americans. Much of this growth continues to come from increased mobile content and the rise of the mobile web as a viewing option.”

The researchers found that 131.1 million Americans watched video on the Internet in the first quarter of 2009 – a 13 percent increase over the same period as 2008.

What do time shifting, watching video online and on smart phones have in common – little or no advertising. Anyone who owns a DVR knows that it is programmed to skip by commercials. Most DVRs record the last five seconds of commercial to ensure none of the program is missed. That’s why marketers in Europe are developing five-second ads. They hope they can at least make an impression on a viewer.

I think we are about to see a massive change in the way people wath videos.

I think what we are seeing is a shift away from traditional television watching. As I said, the sun hasn’t set yet on traditional television. But it’s late afternoon for the 70-year-old medium.

The report notes that the age group that spends the most time watching time-shifted television are the 24- to 35-year-olds. They spent just over 12 hours a month watching something they had recorded. What marketers should really notice is that 12- to 17-year-olds spend the most time watching video on their phones – 6.5 hours a month. This is a group everybody wants to reach. The theory is that they haven’t yet formed any brand loyalty.

So, what I take from this is that the younger you are, the less likely you are to be wedded to traditional television. Oh, you still watch it, but you are gradually integrating newer technologies into your viewing universe.

Incidentally, while I don’t have any data to back this up, I think the same thing is happening in the rest of the world. In fact, since on-line video watching demands broadband hookups, I have a feeling the rest of the world is further along than the United States. Broadband in most of the world is much faster that in the U.S.

I think the snowball has started to roll downhill. The avalanche hasn’t gotten serious yet, but it is at the point where it cannot be stopped. Marketers and their clients had better start looking for alternatives.

I have to admit, some are clever. But, that doesn’t mean I ever would buy a product based on what some actor tells me. And as for car dealerships – why I would buy anything from someone who shouts at me? TV advertising just doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t matter that people are watching a lot more television than ever.

According to an August article published by MarketingVox.com: “by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990, according to a study from McKinsey & Co.

“That forecast assumes a 15 percent decrease in buying power driven by CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) rate increases; a 23 percent decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a nine percent loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking; and a 37 percent decrease in message impact due to saturation, AdAge reports (via MediaBuyerPlanner). According to McKinsey, real ad spending on prime-time broadcast TV has increased over last decade by about 40 percent even as viewers have dropped almost 50 percent.”

I often give my new clients a little quiz: I ask them what is their favorite TV commercial. About half cannot name one. Of the remainder, about half of them cannot remember what company or what product was being pushed. Of that final 25 percent, most of them say they like the commercial, but wouldn’t buy the product.

Those commercials are a nice try on an advertisers part, but in real life, nice tries get you nothing.

Which brings me to my point

It doesn’t bother me that advertisers are wasting their money. It’s their business and their money.

What really bothers me is when a company shows the same ad over and over and over again. I cannot speak for all markets – just Milwaukee. And Milwaukee is often used as a test market, so maybe we get more commercials than the average metro area.

I will give an example. The Olive Garden is running a campaign positioning itself as a mid-range restaurant. If you haven’t seen it, the commercials feature various groups of people meeting at an Olive Garden to share good food and companionship. So far, so good.

However for some reason, the campaign has devolved into the same commercial over and over again. It features a mom and dad visiting their daughter at college. When I first saw it, I thought it was pretty good. It had a key element that made it realistic – it showed the parents taking their daughter – and her friends – out for a meal.  Speaking as the parent of two now college graduates, I think we fed half of Miami University of Ohio and Purdue University.

However, by the 20^th time I watched the family talk about eating pasta at Olive Garden, I was screaming at the television. Other companies have done the same thing – I love Southwest Airlines, but I was going to throw something at the television if I heard the phrase: “it’s on” one more time.

What I want to do to my television after one too many commercials.

I once read a study that after six or seven screenings, people start to resent television ads. After 20 or so showings, the reaction to the overplay can actually make people not buy a product.

You know, it’s nice when someone else makes the case for social media, even if they don’t mean to.

As said I Monday, I will not be publishing next week. The next blog will run Jan. 4^th. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all.