Product placement is one of the most obvious ones.  It’s one of the rules of the Top Chef drinking game, and that rule alone would have you pretty buzzed by the end.  I will give them credit for keeping most of the placements relevant to the “story” A few things like the phone placements this season were a bit forced, but in general they work.  A stove or wine brand makes perfect sense in a show about cooking.

Top Chef also does a great job of providing challenge sponsorship opportunities.  Creating a frozen dinner (Bertolli) or low calorie treat (Dr. Pepper) makes sense for the brands in the past that have done it.   The Glad family of products sponsors the overall pride and gets more than frequent mentions as a result.

Even those placing traditional ads might get a bit better off in the show.  They use frequent mini-sodes that bring fans back into the show if they tune out or try to skip past via Tivo.  I haven’t touched the mobile content or website integration, which further extend the show in advertiser friendly methods.

I don’t have the data that proves or disproves the effectiveness of their tactics.  What I can say is that the same sponsors have appeared season after season.  To me, that’s pretty good evidence that something is working.

There is a real lesson that any marketer can use.  Engagement is key to effectiveness.  If you find a place to promote your product that is relevant, it’s likely that you’ll do better.  Placement matters for you and your brand.  Scattershot placements are far less valuable than relevant ones.

I’m still a bit torn about the effectiveness of the tactic.  On the positive hand, the show sponsor idea felt a bit like the old days of TV.  With the characters making product pitches, there was a feeling of continuity.  It certainly couldn’t be tivoed or skipped too easily. It will work just fine if distributed online.  The products were pretty omnipresent throughout the show, if only as backgrounds.  Frankly, a location of a supermarket makes consumer packaged goods easy to display.

On the negative hand, the product pitches felt completely inserted into the show.  Twice the characters found a sudden and extraneous need to use a product.  The pitch was all about the product and only that product.  It felt completely inserted.

I was also confused for a while about which brand sponsored the program. The pitches were pretty generic.  The lotion segment could have been any lotion, and the same was true of the mayo.  Compounding this was a lack of distinctive packaging for the brand sponsors, since the weren’t shown that close up.  To me, the Vaseline for men lotion bottle closely resembles the Nivea for Men bottle. In addition, mayo jars pretty much all look identical, so Hellmann’s could have been Kraft.

The two bottles

Nivea Packaging

I tend to lean towards this as a failed experiment, but it’s still one to watch.

My answer is both everything and nothing.  The relevance of local depends on your strategy.  If you sell furniture, people in your area are likely the only sales prospects that you have.  People rarely ship furniture and to do so is quite expensive.  If you are a start-up brand with limited distribution as of yet, local may matter quite a lot.  Cooperative advertising with your distribution partners can be a cost effective means for building your brand.

For others it might mean nothing at all.  If your product can be shipped easily, and uses direct response channels like telesales and the internet, local media channels are nearly irrelevant.

The next question is what is the best way to tap into local.  Newspapers are obviously one, and even with their well chronicled decline they still reach vast numbers of people on a daily basis.  Split run advertising as with “zoned” products can bring the cost of entry to a reasonable level.  Outdoor is also a possibility, but messages need to be very simple to be effective.

The most interesting possibilities are those of event marketing on a local level.  Playing a memorable part in local events can both establish you as a member of the community and reach your target quite effectively.  Donating a prize to a Church raffle can reach quite a number of people and position your company in a positive light.  A table at a local street party can get people to sample your product and create new customers nearly instantly.  These tend to be high risk endeavors, as they either are very successful or go completely unnoticed.  The same advice applies here as with any other marketing.  Establish a concrete goal and be relentless about matching the tactic to it.  For one example, having your logo on a gift bag is superfluous if you want your product to be sampled.

Unfortunately, many people are very wrong on the quality issue.  Check out this release from JD power on vehicle dependability, and look at the brands that are above average.  Lexus tops the list, but Mercury, Cadillac, Buick and Lincoln are all in the top 10, and all are above Honda. Ford is just above average.  I’ll admit that Chrysler still has issues, but compare that to Volkswagen or Volvo which seem to hold high esteem in many people’s mind.  What has gone wrong is at the root of branding.

Brands aren’t the most recent message a consumer absorbs about a product.  It’s the collective experiences a consumer has with a brand over.  If I say a word like newspaper, you’ll bring up not only the definition, but all of the parts of the experience.  You may remember stories, ads, a product that you can take with you to the restroom, or even delivering them.  You might also think of outdated media, bias, clippings you’ve made, obituaries or other personal encounters.  It makes what we define as a newspaper have a rich context, and it isn’t just shaped by the billboard you see on your way home.

The hard part is that negative experiences can be hard to erase.  This New York Times article references quality problems encountered with Oldsmobile in the 70′s. The companies have moved a long way since then, and Oldsmobile doesn’t even exist as a brand.  The attribution of poor quality is made to “American automakers” more than a specific car, era, or brand.  Even thought this attribution is logically no longer relevant, it still shapes the authors opinions, as I’m sure it does for many consumers.  I’ll personally admit that I haven’t owned an American car since the 1995 Dodge Neon that I bought just before finishing college.  That car self destructed well before 100,000 miles, and jaded my own opinion of the domestics.

This should be a reminder to all brand owners.  Even a momentary slip on your brand’s promise can cause you to lose a customer forever.  It’s hard to get consumers to resample a product after a dissatisfactory experience.  It might even be harder than acquiring a new customer.

The internet, however is an entirely different animal.  It’s possible to revise ads on a very regular basis, and test numerous combinations of webpage elements.  Its as close as a credit card and a bit of creativity.  There are even plenty of agencies that can help measure the return on investment of your efforts.

The smallest brands can play this game.  Bet it all on one backpage newspaper ad, or try to create a facebook page?  Experiment or go with tried and true?  Display or search?  Try it all in very small scale and pick the winner.  True results trump a focus group and the added benefit is the sales along the way.

I’ll leave out the company, but lets say their initials are lmb.  As a business model they do second mortgages and other refinancing.  One could normally consider them to be a sub prime broker or lender.  

Given the general malaise in the market and the central issue being loose lending practices, there’s all kinds of cognitive dissonance going on with these ads.  However, I’ve seen variants of them for months if not years, and I see them with amazing frequency.  Most recently they are making heavy rotation on my financial news of choice, cnbc.com

Let’s get in the head of the average consumer, or at least make some guesses.  I’m checking out the latest in the dow, and recently watching it decline precipitously.  I’ve heard over and over again that credit is getting tighter.  And there it is, some one dancing off to the side of the page.  Next to the dancing person there’s some heavy copy about refinancing and bush approving a housing bill.  They offer for me to calculate a new house payment.  Only in the smallest grey type do I see the advertiser’s brand.  

Sure it makes no sense, and it might violate every rule of advertising.  They are combining 3 different messages in a way that is not very appealing or clear.  There’s no clear offer.  The dancing people have little to do with anything, and are obviously there just to garner attention.  The brand is nearly invisible.  On the other hand I have to conclude that it works, at least to get people to come to their site, because they keep doing the same basic ad.  They must garner enough attention, and pique the curiosity of their target enough to get that elusive click.  Or perhaps their business model is lucrative enough to pay for absurd numbers of impressions.  Whatever it is, in this era of data, something has to be working right?

i have to admit that I hope not.  It in many ways it is the opposite of showing respect for the consumer.  Maybe the average advertiser can learn from the motion used, as it might really help you get noticed among a largely static webpage.

My interest here is the sheer amount of conversation this move has created.  I’m not sure if Crispin Porter + Bogusky is that brilliant, but they did claim from the beginning they were trying to get people to talk about windows and the campaign.  That has most certainly been achieved.  The two million video views on youtube, as noted in my prior post, is pretty strong evidence.

What I remain puzzled by is such moves have created a negative buzz.  The old rule of PR was: “I don’t care what they say, just make sure they spell the name right” but I can’t believe it applies in this case.  Also if as rumored they are going straight after the much beloved Mac/PC ads, they are certain to encounter an even bigger storm of negativity.  

However, the person that really needs to be convinced is not the online elitist, but an “average” consumer who doesn’t write blogs or get as involved in advertising and marketing as some others.  Is the bewilderment over the first couple of ads real for them, or did they just enjoy watching Seinfeld again?  Did people start to change their opinion of Microsoft after seeing some commercials that were nearly completely unrelated to actual products?  Will they even attribute those few vignettes to Microsoft at all?  My guess is most people somewhat enjoyed the commercials and shifted their opinion every so slightly positively for Microsoft.  It’s nudging a battle ship, but still an ever so slight move in the right direction.  

There’s still a big risk to this approach, and according to most the effort has been very expensive.  Microsoft is attacking a huge strategic problem of a bad corporate image in a very unusual way, but with an impressive and patient approach.

The second installment debuted on microsoft, and was quickly ported over to youtube (by microsoft themselves).  This video is over four minutes long and reveals a bit more about the reason behind the campaign.  Windows wants to connect with real people.  To do so they employed two extraordinary wealthy individuals and “embedded” them into a normal family.  Again, the feature has very little about computers.  However, this one is pretty funny, despite being a bit confusing.

There are a number of very interesting things here.  The second commercial (more accuratly a webisode) tells you exactly what the first was trying to accomplish.  It’s so above board about it, that you can’t help but respect that Microsoft realizes they have a very serious image problem.

The second interesting point is the amount of buzz these items have generated.  Each of the videos has generated around 1M views on youtube.  That’s no sneezing panda, but pretty sold for a video that’s been up for only a few weeks and requires an attention span longer than the typical 14 year old in need or ritalin (or average blogger for that matter).  Lots of people may hate it, but they are taking the time to post, comment and otherwise communicate about it.  It is sparking an honest debate.  That’s quite impressive given that a vast majority of Microsoft postings in the past tended to be harshly critical.

At the bottom line, I’m not sure if the commercial will be all that effective or not.  It’s quite the undertaking to take a brand as well known as Microsoft and change they way people view it.  In the end it might end up be an ad campaign about nothing.   However, at the very least they are taking on a huge problem in a very impressive manner using methods that only they could.

Smaller brands can learn a lot from this situation.  The biggest lesson is to never let your brand get this far out of control.  They were the big bad monopolist for a very long time and tended to ignore consumers along the way.  It’s what got Microsoft in the pickle between apple and needing to do a campaign like this.  The second lesson is that respecting your consumer’s intelligence can go a long way toward getting your message spread.  It’s my opinion that the reason this ad is generating this level of communicaiton is how frank and honest it is about the situation they are trying to address.