New Post: "Because you're worth it"

“Once upon a time a little-set-up was bought over by the Big Daddy .The owners of the little-set-up retired in comfort and lived happily ever after. The End.”

That’s a fairy tale many little companies wish to hear and it’ll most definitely happen - during bed time, that is, in your dreams. And we know also of many well established ad agencies, little ones in the talks with conglomerates Big Daddies, hoping to get taken up picked up.

Last year we held a marketing peer briefing where we invited Jane Hoban from the Body Shop to speak. One of the topics that was brought forth during the Q&A was the acquisition of the UK company by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal.

Hogan gamely replied that it has not affected the values of the company and in fact Body Shop has been trying hard to influence L’Oreal’s policies internally and that its delay in hitting the booming China market was due to - the non-conformity of the motherland’s policies with its own on not testing with animals.

Say no to animal cruelty

Fair enough. Good try.

A few days later I met up with a lady that was familiar with the Mag’s peer briefings because she had been to a couple previously. I asked her about her non-attendance this time and she replied, “After the acquisition, I don’t think I can stand alongside their values any longer.”

So herein lies the question do mergers and acquisitions necessarily work for brands? For any company you wish to create a connect with your target audience. But what if you do well and agree to a merger or nod your heads at being acquired?

Like Lonely Planet to BBC, Hallmark to CNBC, You-Tube to Google, Reebok to Adidas.. and now possibly Yahoo with “the-highest-bidder-wins”.

Have they or will they fare well?

Some are too premature and will need a longer incubation period to see the effects but its seems to be that if you’re the one being eaten, you will insist that nothing will change and it will be for the better. However slowly but surely, intrinsically you’ll start to lose your identity till perfect merger occurs and you’ll be remembered only with a wistful smile and a wave of the hand as your past-fans wax lyrical about your glorified past.

Well I suppose if Body Shop did ask L’Oreal for a comment on a merger they’d probably answer,

"Because you're worth it"

652 million pounds that is.

But as a marketer or even as a consumer… how do you feel when your pal seems to have sold out and moved on to the darker side? Share with us your thoughts.

Mamma Mia!

Some might call this clever, others might call this distasteful – whatever you call it, it certainly gets the eyeballs, practically grabbing them out of their sockets in disbelief as you scream OMG! and point at the pizza box that once contained a yummy tasting Italian treat.

Adrants turned me on to this, shall we say, unique pizza box advertisement. As you can see from the following images, the ad for an extermination company is placed under the pizza so the consumer doesn’t see it until he’s finished with the meal. I think i've seen something similar to this before though but it's still worth a look..









Mamma Mia indeed!

Stand up for the champions

As a proud Manchester United fan, I was left shell shocked by the manner of our 2-1 derby defeat to Citeh – on the 50th anniversary of the Munich Air crash no less – but our local rivals were not the only winners that afternoon as the ‘sponsor-less’ commemorative jerseys worn by the United players seemed to magically spell out AIG every time I looked.

AIG paid in the millions to get their logo on Man U’s jerseys but if brand awareness could be considered the end all and be all of ROI then it was well worth it. As much as I hate how modern football jerseys look these days (with the huge logos of sponsors plastered all over the place), I have grown accustom to it – and the absence of it in Sunday night’s match kept reminding me that something was missing. It seems in my mind that AIG and the English champions go hand in hand – not a bad association to have for a brand. Too bad we played so badly!

Of course I know if I lived in the red half of Manchester then I would be amongst the minority to think so positively about AIG because of events leading up the match. A lot of fans were non-to-happy that AIG managed to get their logo onto a tribute graphic outside of Old Trafford.



Here’s what a Manchester United blog called Red Rants had to say about the whole incident.

I can’t help but cringe at the shallowness underneath it all that’s somehow made it up through the corridors of power that inhabit Old Trafford these days.

Doesn’t the appearance of the AIG logo stink? They got the shirt deal and all that. But it has been made clear everywhere that no one should be allowed to make any commercial gains from the Munich tribute. It is a tragedy that is meant to be beyond petty advertising and attention crabbing whores. It is for the families/players affected by the tragedy and for the fans.

And this is why the presence of the AIG logo, however inconspicuous they intend to make it look, concerns me. It shows a total lack of understanding on not just the part of the owners; we really don’t expect them to know too much, do we? But it is appalling that people like David Gill, who do have some say and understanding of the sentiments of fans, seem to have ignored this detail.

And not just that. How could they even get the words of United Calypso wrong? It’s okay if it was a typist rattling away on his keyboard trying to meet some article deadline. But in full blown panels that occupy the East Stand facade of OT that’s just unforgivable, and terribly negligent. It would certainly be grating for fans entering the premises.

Oh well AIG, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

The day after…

This year’s Super Bowl provided plenty of drama even without any wardrobe malfunctions. Something like 40 ads were aired that day, all of them watched, not all of them remembered. Which ones did you love, hate or just thought were weird.

The ones I liked and why…

I have to say that as a beginner to the madness that is Super Bowl ads, I was expecting a lot of highly creative work – the cream of American creativity I expected. What I did find was more like the cream of American slapstick humour which I have been desensitised too. That being said, here’s my Super Bowl top 5: -

1) E-Trade ‘baby’ ads – a talking baby giving you financial advice with a funny twist at the end. It’s good because the message is not lost on the humour and you will definitely remember the ad.

2) Pepsi’s Timberlake ad – seeing Justin Timberlake getting thrown around would make anyone smile. But the ad also effectively gets a simple message across – every sip gets you closer to Justin Timberlake mp3s, etc….” Watch for the crotch shot towards the end!

3) T-Mobile’s ‘Hi Chuck’ ad – maybe it’s the fact that I have been a basketball fan since the days of Sir Charles Barkley or Chuck, but I just thought this ad was great. Having him put up-and-comer Dwayne Wade into his T-Mobile’s fave five function showcases the product in a funny but believable light.

4) Audi’s ‘Hood’ ad – spoofing all-time great scenes from famous movies can be a no-no but here Audi is able to tap on the Godfather reference and connect with its target audience.

5) Go Daddy Danica’s exposure ad – this spot didn’t run on Super Bowl because it was rejected for being too crude. But they ran a spot directing viewers to its site where they hosted the ad. It’s funny as hell but you still get the message in the end.

So 97.5 million viewers saw the New York Giants' last-minute win over the New England Patriots making it the most-watched Super Bowl ever and second biggest event in American television history. And it has proven once again to be a TV event where just as many people watch the ads as they do the program.

Of course there were plenty of crap ads out there and to keep this post short I wont go into them – please feel free to comment on which ones you hated though – one thing that was interesting about this year’s Super Bowl was that it featured only one beer ad and four for either soft drinks or flavored water.

Cloverfield: Don’t believe the hype?

This morning, a small section of our office had been debating whether or not Cloverfield is a bad movie with good marketing or a good movie but only if you don’t pay attention to the marketing.

Thanks to Getty Images who furnished my colleagues and I with tickets to watch the screening at VivoCity which I thought was an “awesome” movie – however, my colleagues had far less enthusiasm for it and after a few more “awesomes” from me this morning…I was hardly the most popular man at Lighthouse.

So what is the cause of this polarised opinion? Taking out of consideration that certain genres of movies just don’t appeal to some – I reckon the marketing and the hype the filmmakers attempted to stir prior to its release should take some of the blame.

The colleague, who had the most negative things to say about the movie, was the one in the office who knew the most about the movie, and had seen its viral marketing efforts, and was already raving about the film she hadn’t seen. In short, she was the one who had been infected the heaviest by Cloverfield’s viral marketing game plan which involved the strategic release of two trailers with the first trailer disclosing the release date and not the movie title, and second trailer confirming the title months later.

The appearance of an untitled trailer fuelled media speculation over the film’s plot that generated global hype and in the case of my colleague – led her to put the film on a pedestal just as so many did with the Blair Witch Project where an amazing amount of people within your inner circle of friends passed on the message that you’re about to watch the most scariest show ever… I was pretty disappointed at the end of that show.

This time however, I didn’t buy into the hype and watched Cloverfield without knowing anything about the film except that it was going to be told from the point of view of the protagonist’s video camera and that the statue of liberty’s head gets ripped off – cool I thought to myself.

At the end of the day, the basic success measurement of the marketing will be judge on crowd numbers that watch the film but it will interesting to wait and see what happens when disappointed film-goers start ripping into film via online platforms. Will that make more people want to see the film to judge for themselves or will it deter people from buying a ticket?

If you go to watch the film though, make sure you sit near the back because the shaky camera theme can be nauseating to some.