Advertising

Dueling Brands Pick Up Where Politicians Leave Off

By STUART ELLIOTT

Published: November 3, 2008

ELECTION Day will bring an end to the negative political advertising that has inundated the country. But it will not mean an end to negative advertising.

An image from a response ad by Microsoft meant to counter a campaign from Apple that characterizes PCs as geeky.

Multimedia

Dunkin' Teases Starbucks

Campbell Goes Negative

With a mode reminiscent of political ads, Campbell Soup, in a campaign for its Select Harvest line, attacks Progresso by name.

Dunkin’ Brands goes after Starbucks, promoting a Web site that features the results of a taste test that favored its coffee.

That is because marketers of consumer products, borrowing a page from the electoral playbook, are becoming more willing to run aggressive ads in which brands attack their competitors by name. A major reason for the growing popularity of such ads is the faltering economy, on the theory that when times are hard, you should hit your opponent harder.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/business/media/04adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign Change -- and Positioning -- You Can Believe in By Al Ries

Nov. 4, 2008, will go down in history as the biggest day ever in the history of marketing.

Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator.

Obama owns the 'change' idea in voters' minds.

Photo Credit: AP

It didn't matter. Barack Obama had a better marketing strategy than either of them. "Change.
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http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=132237

Kraft Reformulates Oreo,Scores in China

By JULIE JARGON
May 1, 2008

Unlike its iconic American counterpart, the Oreo sold in China is frequently long, thin, four-layered and coated in chocolate. But both kinds of cookies have one important thing in common: They are now best sellers.

The Oreo has long been the top-selling cookie in the U.S. market. But Kraft Foods Inc. had to reinvent the Oreo to make it sell well in the world's most populous nation. While Chinese Oreo sales represent a tiny fraction of Kraft's $37.2 billion in annual revenue, the cookie's journey in China exemplifies the kind of entrepreneurial transformation that Chief Executive Irene Rosenfeld is trying to spread throughout the food giant.

Kraft, the world's second largest food company by revenue, reported a 13% drop in first-quarter net income Wednesday because of high commodity costs and increased spending on product research and marketing. Its international business, which now represents 40% of Kraft's revenue thanks to the company's recent acquisition of Groupe Danone's biscuits business, was a bright spot in the quarter, aided by the weak dollar. Kraft's profit in the European Union rose 48%, excluding special charges, and its profit in developing markets rose 57%.

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http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120958152962857053.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Are you a manager or leader

Marketing Definitions
Are you a manager or leader?

To find out, let's start with the Oxford English Dictionary:

Manager: 'A person controlling or administering a business.'

Leader: 'A person who causes others to go with him, by guiding and showing the way; guides by persuasion and argument.'

And a quote that provides a useful comparison:

"Leadership is often confused with other things, specifically management. As I see it, leadership revolves around vision, ideas, direction, and has more to do with inspiring people as to direction and goals than with day-to-day implementation. One can't lead unless one can leverage more than his own capabilities . . . You have to be capable of inspiring other people to do things without actually sitting on top of them with a checklist - that's management, not leadership."
John Sculley

Notice the difference in the words being used - controlling, sitting on top of someone, administering, as opposed to causes . . . . by guiding, showing the way, inspiring, direction, goals.

To focus this even more, let's look at a list of contrasting words that describe even more fully the differences between managers and leaders.

MANAGERS administer are a copy maintain systems/structure focus control short-term how/when bottom line imitate accept good soldier do things right

LEADERS innovate are an original develop people focus trust long-range what/why horizon originate challenge own person do the right thing

John Adair, a British leadership guru, continued to explore these distinctions by going back to the etymological roots of the two words.

Lead is from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning a road, a way, a path. It's knowing what the next step is. Managing is from the Latin, manus, a hand. It's about handling, and is closely linked with the idea of machines and came to prominence in the 19th century, as engineers and accountants emerged to run what had previously been entrepreneurial businesses.

Adair goes on to make another distinction - managers can be appointed, leaders must be ratified in the hearts and the minds of those who work for them.

In a stable and highly structured environment it is managers who will excel. In dynamic environments - where change is rapid and there are few points of reference - it is leadership that is needed.

Look at the attributes in the two lists above, and ask yourself:

Which are most critical to achieving success, in the situation I am in?
How do I match up to them?

Welcome to the Outernet

A little known billboard advertising giant plots its digital future.

By Richard Siklos, editor at large

The new face of advertising

(Fortune) -- Kevin Reilly Jr. chuckled when I described my ineptitude while recently trying to transfer photos onto a digital picture frame, which is supposed to display hundreds of rotating images. Let's just say that getting the digital frame to work is easier said than done, and I mentioned this to Reilly because he is attempting something similar on a vastly grander scale.

Reilly is the CEO of Lamar Advertising (LAMR), whose $3.5 billion market value is more than New York Times Company. But his company doesn't get a lot of ink, mostly because it operates in the least sexy quarter of the media whirl: billboards. While its two bigger rivals - Clear Channel (CCU, Fortune 500) and CBS Outdoor (CBS, Fortune 500) - are each linked to radio empires and tend to dominate big cities, Lamar has stuck to its original business and acquired more than 150,000 static billboards. It also puts posters on the sides of buses in the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada.

A few years ago, Reilly and his colleagues had an epiphany: Unlike other forms of media, the basic business of building walls on stilts and selling ads on them wasn't under direct threat from the Internet. If anything, technology could help billboard operators like Lamar save money. By using digital technology and broadband connections, Lamar could stitch together a network in which a single ad could be displayed at multiple locations. And as prices for next-generation screens fell, Reilly figured, any billboard could be turned into a veritable Jumbotron: like my digital picture frame, multiple images can be rotated across the screen.

more: http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/06/news/companies/siklos_lamar.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008040707

Publicis, Dentsu CEOs share their visions of the ad agency of the future

AAAA SmartBrief | 04/14/2008

Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy and Dentsu Chairman-CEO Tateo Mataki both agree the traditional agency model needs to be rethought, but disagree on the extent of the changes needed. Mataki, speaking at an ad industry conference, described a new model in which agencies and clients "share risks and rewards equally," while Levy believes the "magic tripod" of advertiser, agency and media owner is still viable. Advertising Age (04/09)

Naked tells truth about corporate advertising

By Louise Story

NEW YORK: It takes a bit of courage, and perhaps a lot of ego, to tell large companies that their ad campaigns have been failing miserably.

But that's exactly what the advertising firm Naked claims to do regularly.

"We get up in front of a group of agencies and tell them, very nicely, that they have wasted tens of millions of dollars," said Ben Richards, senior strategist at Naked New York.

For that advice, of course, Naked hopes to earn a chunk of the supposedly wasted money. The company specializes in helping clients select the right balance of media for its message - shifting, perhaps, away from television and toward the Internet, or maybe in other directions.

Naked is one of the specialists in an emerging area in marketing called "communications planning," which tries to look beyond the 30-second spot to new ways to reach potential customers. The company, which got its start in 2000 in London and opened an office in New York two years ago, has in the last year signed up clients like Kimberly-Clark, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.

more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/09/technology/naked.php