Calling Bullsh*t on Black Friday

Leather jackets for $25!

Complete drill set for $14.99!

Two for one hoodies!

599 doorbusters storewide!

The TV has been screaming deals out for two weeks now. At this point, who can keep track? Old Navy has the 3 for 1 turtlenecks, right? Or were they opening at three? Or was it one? I have to get to Sears by 4:00am for $5.00 cardigans. Or was it 5:00am for $4.00 neckties?

In the blur of Black Friday doorbuster deals, any good marketer has to wonder if the message is getting through. After all, there are only so many crazy consumers willing to forsake sleeping in on a day off from work for the fabulous Black Friday savings at the mall. Diamond necklaces for $49.99 just might not be worthy of a 5:00am wake up call. Exactly what type of diamonds are those anyway?

There’s a fair amount of bull… um, baloney… in Black Friday advertising. Sure, some doorbusters are worthy of their name, but others… well, you have to wonder what a $25 leather jacket is really made of.

The marketers at Jetson, a Florida-based electronics and appliance retailer, seem to be wondering the same thing. So, they decided to call out some of this year’s questionable doorbuster deals in a TV campaign that calls Bullsh*t on Black Friday.

Launched last week, the original spots got pulled because the use of an announcer saying “Bull” with a “bleep” after it was a little too risqué for wholesome, Floridian audiences. The revised version is just as good.

Enjoy watching (unless you are already out there checking out those Whatchamacallit TV deals).

Ahoy! Blue Ocean ahead!

About a year ago I finished “Blue Ocean Strategy,” an interesting book penned by two esteemed academics. Unlike other marketing books full of frothy creative ideas, “Blue Ocean Strategy contends that success can be achieved through a proven systematic approach. This approach doesn’t focus on besting your competition; rather it makes your competition irrelevant. When you create your own Blue Ocean, you sail it alone on the way to success like you’ve never imagined.

The book was enlightening and, I thought, wholly achievable. After all, they outline the system for creating a blue ocean. With a little creative thinking (an abundant resource at RWA), we could create our own blue ocean. One year later, we’re still sharing the seas with our competition.

I had begun to question whether blue oceans existed anymore when I came across an article in the New York Times this week entitled “Using Marijuana Stores to Market Food.”

It appears that the Attorney General’s decision to end the Bush administration’s practice of frequency raiding marijuana dispensaries has spawned a most unexpected result – the emergence of a blue ocean. We can also credit the AG with a whole new crop of business innovators aptly dubbed “ganjapreneurs.”

One such ganjapreneur is Hapa Sushi, a Colorado sushi restaurant chain. Recognizing the obvious connection between getting high and getting the munchies, Hapa Sushi is tapping the newly liberated marijuana market with ads touting the restaurants’ proximity to dispensaries around town. So residents can now grab a baggy to roll and a California roll all in the same trip.

It’s maybe not quite what the authors had in mind, but it’s a hell of a blue ocean.

Sail on, Hapa Sushi. Sail on.

American consumers are anything but normal.

After a decade of wondering, marketers will finally get a close-up look at today’s consumers when the decennial Census is released next year. Maybe it’s not as great a mystery as the balloon boy, though. Preliminary data has leaked out and the results are… well… predictably abnormal.

Abnormal is bad news for advertisers looking to reach the average consumer. If you are one of these, don’t despair. You are not alone. Many businesses have invested their advertising budgets in reaching that middle-of-the-road consumer, married, two kids, average house, average job, vacations once a year and buys toothpaste on a regular basis. The good news is they still buy toothpaste. The bad news is they are no longer anywhere near the middle of the road.

Ad Age’s sneak peak of the 2010 Census data reveals that the average American has been replaced by a multidimensional individual who is difficult to define under any one category.

What does your average American look like now?

Chances are he is not married with two kids. He’s more likely to have no children or be single. In fact, the census now has 14 choices Americans can select from to define their household including multigenerational and blended families.

He is likely to be a minority. While white, non-Hispanics constitute 80 percent of people 65 and older, this percentage drops to 54 among Americans 18 and younger.

He lives in the South or the West or is thinking of moving there. Over the past decade, 85 percent of the nation’s population growth has occurred in the South and West.

Marketers looking for middle America will have to start looking elsewhere. Your average consumer is nowhere to be found. Perhaps this is a good thing. Who wants to be average anyway?

Getting your plastic shoe in the door

The RWA conference room looks like a bomb hit it. Empty cans of spray mount and pieces of foam board litter the floor. A glue gun drips metallic drops of gold wax while raffia strands coil amid crumpled up tissue paper and glue dots gone bad. A cardboard box overflows with naked Ken dolls.

Um, what was that last part?

Admittedly 50 naked Ken dolls is a rather unusual item to have in a conference room (even in a creative agency like RWA), but there is a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why we have so many commando Kens in the house. We needed their clothes.

Several months ago we were approached by a company looking to catch the attention of CEOs. Their service, a method of outsourcing CFO functions, provided many great benefits to CEOs looking for better financial reporting and forecasting. However, the company had been unsuccessful getting its message past company gatekeepers and into the hands of the CEOs it wanted to talk to. Letters and phone calls weren’t getting any response. They needed something so innovative, CEOs would have to pay attention.

Their problem is not unique. Lots of companies (including RWA) know exactly who their target is and where to find them. They have names, numbers and vital statistics. They know that their target needs their company and they know how their product or service would help them and why. If they could just get a chance to talk to their target, they know they could land a new customer. But, they are getting nowhere with letters, phone calls and e-mails. They are at a crossroads. They can give up or they can try something so different, so crazy, so completely unexpected, the target will notice whether they like it or not.

Which leads us back to the 50 naked Ken dolls.

For this client, the unexpected is a garment box containing a three piece suit complete with tie and dress shoes. The suit, of course, is empty. The message simply asks “Is your CFO an empty suit?” and suggests calling if the company needs someone who can better fill it.

Will it work? The packages go out this week so we don’t know yet. How would you respond if you got an empty suit in the mail? Would you pick up the phone and call? I would. I’d want to know what happened to Ken. Wouldn’t you?

Collateral materials for the online world

Nothing ignites the spark in a creative’s eye more than a fat, juicy collateral project. Visions of pages of empty design space dance in their heads. In a daze, they head for their paper samples, dusting off the never-used books marked “mill item.” Finally, they think. This is what I’ve been dreaming of. This is why I became a designer.

Then reality sets in. Not many clients understand the need to spend $53,000 on a brochure when they can invest in the new C63 Mercedes AMG Sport Sedan instead. The design of a lifetime is doomed to existence only on a desktop, never in print.

Luckily, print isn’t all that in the electronic world. Today you can still produce your collateral piece and the client can get a new ride too thanks to new, virtual brochures. These virtual brochures give designers and clients a way to bring their collateral pieces to life with all the functionality of a printed piece.

More interactive than a PDF and less costly than a website, virtual books and brochures allow a customer to flip through your collateral materials as though they were holding them in hand. The electronic format also allows for music and narration. South Florida voice artist Bob Harper lends his considerable talent to virtual brochures for real estate companies, law firms and even haunted houses.

And, the investment is usually a lot less scary than print.

The case of a billboard campaign that works (unfortunately)

South Florida drivers are arguably the worst drivers in the country. You may debate this under the contention that New York, New Jersey or possibly Boston has far worse drivers than the Sunshine State. You’d be right, until you consider that South Florida is the retirement home for a fair number of road warriors from each of these areas. Put Joey Buttafuoco on I-95 next to Tony Soprano, merge a retired Cliff Clavin into traffic and you can see how South Florida is far more perilous for innocent commuters than the northeast.

So South Florida’s abominable drivers have only themselves to blame for the new billboard campaign that recently launched on major highways throughout the area. The message is simple and the graphics almost childlike. Even drivers careening by at 80mph (25mph over the posted limit) can easily recall the silhouette of a man slipping on a banana and the message “whocanisue.com.”

As appalling as many South Floridians have found its message, this advertising campaign illustrates perfectly the role simple creative plays in effective billboard advertising. The easy to recognize graphic, colorful lettering and text of just 14 characters (including the dot) is wholly memorable to drivers and potential plaintiffs.

Unlike other mediums, a billboard has very little time to make its message hit home. TV has the luxury of 30 seconds, radio has 60 seconds, newspaper ads can be read all day long. A billboard as two seconds or less to catch your attention.

Because of its short timeframe for impact, billboard advertising is one of the most difficult mediums to create ads for. We can, however learn a few things about effective billboard ads from our online lawyer friends.

1. Keep text to seven words or less
2. Use bold, simple fonts with no shadows and leave ample space between letters
3. Use bright colors (reds, blues and greens are good choices)
4. Graphics should be simple with one core elementAvoid using a light blue background (it blends in with the sky)
5. Print a copy of your billboard sized to be about 2 inches wide. Hold it at arm’s length. If you can’t read it, neither can a driver.

Now that you know how to create effective billboard advertising, go out and procreate. And, let’s see something really good to replace the banana peel guy. How hard can THAT be?

SEO/SEM Explained (in Non Geek language)

Back in the good ol' days, just having a website that worked was enough for any business. "Yes, we do have a website," business owners would say proudly. "You can visit us at www.mycompany.com."

Today, having a website is just the beginning of successfully competing in this new, confusing online world. Companies looking to gain new customers via the web are bombarded with sales pitches promising strange new things like optimization and keyword traffic.

Navigating the web world is not as confusing as it looks if you know a couple of basic terms and what they mean.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website easier for search engines (Yahoo, Google) to find. A well optimized website will appear in a higher position when a web user searches for your category of product or service. The process of SEO involves improvements to your website such as implementing keywords, tagging graphics, titling pages and putting good text content on your site. Search engines like these things and will have an easier time finding you if your website has them.

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the process of marketing your website through paid online marketing. SEM can take a lot of different forms, but the most common are keyword searches, banner advertisements and text ads. These types of marketing are sold either on impressions or by clicks.

Keywords are simply words that people may use to search for your product. For instance, "carpet" or "rug" would be common keywords used by people searching for a flooring retailer. Keywords can also include strings of words such as

"Palm Beach carpet store." Google Adwords is one of the best known keyword marketing services.

Pay Per Click means exactly what it sounds like, you pay for people to click on your website. Pay Per Click programs usually involve buying certain keywords. When a user searches for a keyword you purchased, your website is listed. If they click on your website, you pay a predetermined amount for that click.

Impressions are the number of people who see your ad message. An impression is not a click. It simply means your ad appeared on a page that the web user viewed.

Still confused? Stephanie Leffler from Networks Solutions gives some great tips in this four-minute You Tube video.