Social Media & Digital Marketing

I am an older guy. I was on the forefront of the revived brand management movement in the mid-to-late 1990s. And I have ridden it out until the present. I was also an early user of the Internet - going as far back as 1976 when it was primarily a military communication vehicle (ARPANET). Further, I was on the ground floor of coding, learning Fortran, COBOL and basic assembler language in college. When I was at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in New York, I was an expert in reading binary code, hexadecimal code and core dumps to identify coding errors. I had an online newsletter before there were blogs and I started a few of the first marketing-oriented blogs. And, I have kept up with web design, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing (Google, Facebook, et al.), digital marketing, mobile marketing, CRM, data analytics, email marketing, marketing automation, CTV/OTT, geofencing, retargeting, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.

I share this background to indicate that I am grounded in both classical marketing and branding concepts and techniques and the most recent tools and advances in social media and digital marketing. I am not just speaking from one of these two perspectives. And I am not a luddite.

Here is my point. Social media and digital marketing are overrated. Brands and enterprises have become over reliant on them. Why? They are modern - the latest "shiny objects." They are relatively inexpensive. And, most importantly, you can track and measure their results (which cannot be said of many other marketing components).

However, while they have their place in the marketing mix, here is what they continue to lack - the human touch, relationship building, peer-to-peer marketing, real world publicity stunts, and the power of a good salesperson to close a sale.

Yes, over time, blog posts, podcasts and YouTube and Vimeo videos can create a certain level of trust, emotional connection and thought leadership. And, there are ways to make digital content go viral, especially to an extent that cannot be achieved otherwise. However, more "high touch" marketing tactics must be kept in the marketing mix to create a truly integrated and powerful marketing campaign. 

When a person only knows how to use a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When marketers only know social media and digital marketing, the primary marketing vehicle becomes digital by default.

To have a fully rounded marketing campaign that is highly effective, generally you need the following marketing components: target market definition and segmentation, marketing research for customer insight, marketing strategy and plan development, graphic design, videography, copywriting, media planning and placement, media relations and publicity and social media and digital marketing expertise. 

I have witnessed more and more companies with limited resources relying solely on social media and digital marketing to achieve their marketing goals - often with lackluster results. This is not always the case, but it is often the case. 

If I were to start a marketing campaign with very limited resources, I would start with media relations and publicity including proactive publicity and carefully crafted publicity stunts. In today's world, this would include social media and digital marketing. But social media and digital marketing wouldn't be the only components of such a campaign.

So, my core message in this blog post is that while social media and digital marketing are likely to be components of your integrated marketing campaign, they should not be the sole or dominant components of that campaign. 

Budweiser 2017 Super Bowl Ad

As I write this blog post, already more than 8 million people have viewed Budweiser's 2017 Super Bowl commercial "Born the Hard Way" on just one of many YouTube uploads of the ad. It is a rule of thumb in PR that if you can tie your story (or, in this case, ad) to a current popular (and especially controversial) topic, it has a much higher chance of being successful. Not only will the ad be seen by the estimated 189 million people who watch the Super Bowl in person and on television, but I would guess it will receive at least 12 million views on YouTube before that. And that does not count all of impressions created by the media that discussing this commercial as a news story, potentially creating tens of millions of additional impressions for the brand. This is a very smart way to extend one's advertising spending.

And, in case you have not already seen or at least heard about the ad, it is a well crafted one-minute story about how the immigrant Adolphus Busch came to America and met Eberhard Anheuser to found Anheuser-Busch.

Not only will this ad get additional impressions, but it will also create additional discussion online and offline. And, while the point it makes is subtle enough, it will create a greater emotional connection between the brand and a significant portion of the world's population because of the point that it makes. However, it is as much the story of a company's founder as anything else and it is produced in good taste.

Having said that, it will likely turn off some of its customers, but that will only create additional emotional discussion of the brand. It has been said that "all publicity is good publicity," especially regarding a soft approach to a topic like this in which the fallout is likely to diminish quickly and be of little consequence in the long run.

Here is the ad on YouTube is case you have not seen it.

My hat is off to Anheuser-Busch for crafting a Super Bowl commercial that is meaningful and will have legs that will extend well beyond the Super Bowl itself. Kudos!

When The Buzz is Gone

How can you tell when a brand is vital and on the rise? Conversely, how can you tell when a brand and its equity are fading? Buzz. That's right, buzz.

Remember when Amazon.com was first launched? Remember all of the buzz around Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com? And Jeff Bezos still receives a huge amount of buzz. Fortune magazine featured him as Lord Vishnu on its January 2016 cover. Or how about Elon Musk and Tesla Motors? And then there is Donald Trump. Commentators frequently talk about how he sucks all of the oxygen out of any room in which he speaks. And news networks have been blamed for focusing the vast majority of their political news on him. Wegmans gets endless free publicity as towns and municipalities beg to have one of its stores located in their burgs and especially when one does arrive in their communities. Dove received endless free publicity with its "real beauty" campaign. Google continues to receive a lot of buzz, as does YouTube. Apple is still up there as is Samsung and Android.

On the flip side, have you heard anything about these brands lately? OfficeMax. Dress Barn. BlackBerry. Nokia. Volvo. SAAB. LivingSocial. MySpace. Sony. Sears. Radio Shack. A&P. Quiznos. Old Milwaukee. Michelob Light. Quicksilver.

I didn't think so.

Do you want a quick read on the strength of a specific brand? Think about its buzz. Does it have any? Is everyone talking about the brand or have you not heard anyone talk about the brand in years? Perform a Google search on the brand's name. How many entries does it have? Are they recent? Have major publications written substantial stories about the brand? Has it been featured on their covers? Are news networks talking about the brand? Have you talked about the brand today or in the past week?

Buzz is a simple indicator of brand strength.

Proactive Publicity

Proactive publicity can be one of the most powerful and cost-effective marketing tools. Publicity is free, approximately six times as many people read articles as read ads, and articles are more credible as they are perceived to be third-party endorsements vs. self-promotion. Here are some examples of proactive publicity:

• When Hallmark launched the industry’s first personalized, computer-generated cards, they sent cards to talk show hosts.
• EasyJet invested a large portion of its marketing dollars in a lawsuit against KLM, claiming unfair competitive practices, positioning itself as the underdog on the side of the public.
• Trivial Pursuit marketers sent games samples to celebrities featured in the game and to radio personalities who had an affinity for trivia.
• The Peabody Hotel in Memphis has ducks march out of the elevator down a red carpet to its lobby fountain twice a day with great fanfare under the direction of the Peabody Duckmaster. Hundreds of people watch and take pictures, many of which are posted on social media.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition. © 2015 Brad VanAuken. Available here.

Proactive Publicity

I am a big fan of proactive publicity as a way to build your brand. Here are some examples of proactive publicity:

• When Hallmark launched the industry’s first personalized, computer-generated cards, they sent personalized cards to talk show hosts.
• EasyJet invested a large portion of its marketing dollars in a lawsuit against KLM, claiming unfair competitive practices, positioning itself as the underdog on the side of the public.
• Trivial Pursuit marketers sent games samples to celebrities featured in the game and to radio personalities who had an affinity for trivia.
• The Peabody Hotel in Memphis has ducks march out of the elevator down a red carpet to its lobby fountain twice a day with great fanfare under the direction of the Peabody Duckmaster. Hundreds of people watch and take pictures, many of which are posted on social media.
• A nonprofit organization, whose mission was to encourage woman over age 40 to get mammograms annually, wanted a message that would “break through.” I suggested they feature a bare-chested woman with a double mastectomy on outdoor signs along major highways, using shocking copy such as “Over 40? Don’t wait until it is too late. Get a mammogram today.” Or, “Which pain is worse? Over 40? Get a mammogram today.” (Imagine the buzz this billboard campaign would create.)
• To create buzz about the movie Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock floated a dummy of himself down the Thames River.
• In the “Will It Blend?” campaign, Blendtec demonstrated the power and durability of its blenders by posting a series of YouTube videos of its blender blending everyday items (an iPhone, marbles, baseball, crowbar, Bic lighters, Super Glue, etc.).
• Taco Bell quietly conducted nationwide research to find twenty-five men across America named Ronald McDonald, and featured them in television and web ads enjoying items from Taco Bell’s breakfast menu.
• And click here to see how TNT promotes itself with proactive publicity.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition, © 2014 by Brad VanAuken

Pre-order your copy here.