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Dumb question: what’s better for your brand? Buying a Super Bowl ad or investing in social media?

Believe it or not, sick that was the essential question asked on Friday in AdAge’s CMO blog by academic marketing heavyweights Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker. Read it here: Will Social Media Slay the Super Bowl? Beg to Differ would have given it a different title: “Will Apples-to-Oranges Comparisons Lead to Poor Sales of Garbage-Bag-Branded Children’s Dishes?”

What the heck are you talking about?!?

Calkins and Rucker start by saying that many big brands, like Ford, are abandoning Super Bowl advertising in favour of a broader mix of media, including the spectrum of social media tools. They quote Jim Farley, Ford’s global marketing chief, as saying:

“Social media is a better investment for known and established brands. Farley explained in a recent interview: “Customers are spending as much time with the mobile smartphone or online as they are watching TV now, so our advertising dollars have to flow to where the people are.”

“Unfortunately, social media fails to guarantee that brands will reach a large number of consumers. A look at the social-media presence of many well-known brands makes the point. The Hefty brand waste bags’ Facebook page has only 66,000 fans. Windex has fewer than 3,000 fans and the Hampton Inn page has less than 2,000 fans on Facebook.”

So yeah, if you play the “reach” numbers game, those numbers seem pretty paltry when you compare them to the estimated 100 Million or more viewers who are said to watch the Super Bowl every year in the States – and the fact that the ads are now no longer on the sidelines on Super Sunday, but have taken centre field. So point made: if your company can afford to play in the “big leagues” the Super Bowl is a venue you should consider.  But can you justify a decision to sit this one out as Ford did?

Let’s talk Hefty

Which brings us back to the question

The biggest problem with Calkins and Rucker is that while they pay some lip service to social media, they’re showing up to a modern game in a leather helmet. They see the world backwards. They advise advertisers to first “capitalize on the power of PR” (by which they mean the traditional “engage the (old) media” kind). Then think about creative. And only lastly do they refer to social media as a as a “flanking strategy”.

But what Ford and other advertisers are realizing, is that social media has crossed the threshold from being the last thing you think about to being the FIRST thing you need to consider, and to build any old-media campaigns around the response you want to generate.

That’s why the biggest advertising winner on Super Sunday, VW released its ad on YouTube with a well-coordinated campaign well before Super Sunday and already had 7 million clicks before game-time. Or why companies like Network Solutions released Web-only video campaigns to attempt to steal the thunder of established Super Bowl ad hawkers like GoDaddy who in turn try to drive traffic to specific Web-only content that lets them continue the conversation on their own home field.

What do you think? Are Calkin’s and Rucker still trying to win one for the Gipper (when it’s too late), or is Beg to Differ dreaming of football-shooting jetpacks rather than hitting the gridiron?

Branding is about calling attention to the important stuff.

The old expression “can’t see the forest for the trees”, stomach describes a handicap many of us suffer in business – and life: we often focus so hard on tiny details we miss the bigger picture. But what about when you can’t even see the forest because you’ve trained yourself to ignore the trees? Sometimes a well-placed name might be just what you need…

Meet the tree I can’t ignore (but do all the time)

In our back yard, we have a tree. Not just any tree: a monster seven-story oak tree with a four-foot wide trunk. That’s it in the picture above. Now you’d think that it would be pretty tough  to ignore such a huge living thing that shares your small back yard. And you’d be right. Partially.

In the big picture, it’s hard to ignore the impact of that tree in our yard:

• It casts a huge shadow that renders all my attempts at gardening anything but ferns and shade plants absolutely futile.
• Over the last 60 years, it has been involved in a wrestling match with the back wall of my garage, and as you can see, the garage is losing badly.
• It hogs the back corner of my lot and severely limits the kinds of renovations we can consider.
• It’s too tall to climb, and pruning it costs thousands of dollars.

But when you get right down to it, over time any feature of your personal landscape – even a monster tree like this one – becomes very easy to ignore. It becomes invisible the more you live with it. You learn to forget. And working around it becomes second nature.

And isn’t that true for all kinds of obstacles and features of our business lives as well? We talk about the “elephants in the room” that are invisible to us, but are so painfully obvious to outsiders.

But then I saw the forest

A neighbour of mine named Daniel Buckles, who is more active in green issues than I am, helped me notice my tree again by introducing me to the forest. Turns out our tree is a native bur oak, the remnant of an ancient oak forest that used to cover our area of Ottawa. And it’s not alone. Scattered throughout the neighbourhood are a couple dozen other oaks like it, all more than a century old. And ours is the biggest, and among the few that are more than a metre in diameter and estimated to be more than 150 years old.

In other words, those oldest trees are far older than our neighbourhood, possibly older than the city of Ottawa, and certainly older than Canada. Our tree was already around a century old when our hose was built in the 1950’s.

The miracle is this: the developers respected that forest enough to build the neighbourhood around the trees!

And the sad fact is that most people don’t care. Particularly not the developers who are cutting down more and more of these giants every year – including the one who has just applied to cut down the second largest tree to make room for a cookie-cutter infill project.

To that developer, that magnificent tree is at best invisible as they imagine what they can do with the property, at worst, an obstacle to be removed as soon as possible and chopped up for firewood – an obscene amount of high quality firewood.

Enter the brand

In brainstorming what we could do to draw attention to the plight of this tree, we considered doing all the usual stuff: articles in the community newsletter, petitions, educational displays at community events, maybe a Web site, and of course, fighting at city hall to have the permit denied.

But it all felt pretty hollow and futile, like a losing battle. Because in the end we were just talking about one tree, and trying to get people to see the connection between that tree and others like it – which were after all, just individual trees that all of us ignore every day.

That’s why the branding guy in the group kicked into gear and recommended that the first thing our group needed to do was to start calling these trees “The Champlain Oaks” to reflect the location (in the Champlain Park area of Ottawa) and the heritage (connecting them to the explorer Samuel de Champlain, who paddled by here in his exploration of eastern Canada) of these trees.

From there it was easy for me to register the domain and set up our blog at www.champlainoaks.com to start telling the story of these trees and to rally support for protecting them.

It’s not a brilliant, earth-changing name. Quite the opposite. It’s a sensible down-to-earth name that seems like it’s been around a long time. And suddenly, we’re not just fighting the abstract battle of a nameless collection of oak trees. We’ve created a forest in the brains of people who hear the name and talk about the Champlain Oaks.

Think about that. The difference between me saying “I have a big oak tree in my yard” and “I have one of the Champlain Oaks in my yard.” Which one sounds more important, more special, more worthy of protection?

That’s the power of smart branding

By taking a careful look at your landscape, learning to see the trees AND the forest, and deciding out what’s worth celebrating with an intelligently chosen name followed by a smart communications campaign, you can not just call more attention to your cause, your product, or even your favourite group of trees, you can change the conversation.

( Note: if you are interested in the Champlain Oaks project, or want to join us in our fight to save as many of these trees as we can, please visit the site or contact us.)

Important note: the words above are BAD, buy and we don’t approve of any words ever being used to slur or demean human beings.

Seriously, treat it was even painful for me to write them in the headline – particularly since I am neither gay, advice black or Jewish (hence the quotation marks). But this week, three news stories, and three web controversies, erupted over these three incredibly nasty terms, so let’s talk about the power – and complexity – of evil words.

Case 1: removing “nigger” from Huckleberry Finn

A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic Huck Finn will replace all instances of the word “nigger” with the word “slave” for high school classrooms.

Case 2: removing “faggot” from Dire Straits Money for Nothing

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council decides that the “gay slur in lyrics disaqualifies Dire Straits hit from Canadian radio play.”

Case 3: Sarah Palin is raked over the Internet coals for using the term “blood libel”

She used the  term in a video posted to her Web page which has a history of being used as a truly ugly anti-semitic slur.

To me these are all different issues with different historical nuances. But to me that’s the point of talking about them. In the first two instances, two works of art are being “sanitized”, ostensibly to avoid offending a minority group. But in both cases, the words are being used by characters in a way that is authentic to their own time, place, and mode of speech.

In the last, we have a case of a public figure using a sensitive term in a sensitive debate in a way that is either really dumb or really evil, depending on how much credit you give Sarah Palin or her speechwriters. In either case, it was a tone-deaf move and showed a disregard for the loaded history of a term which is guaranteed to create controversy.

So over to you readers.

My question is this: does the kind of micro-censorship we see in the first two cases actually breed the kind of ignorance we see in the Palin case? Is it better to avoid sensitive language, or to deal with it in a thoughtful, intelligent – or even ironic – way, as in Huck Finn and Money for Nothing?

This brand is all about change – the good kind

(Also posted at the United Way Ottawa blog) Over the last year, click I’ve spent a lot of time telling United Way Ottawa what they’re doing wrong – not because I’m mean, unhealthy or a hater, treatment but because they asked me to as an advisor helping them improve their brand strategy. So when they asked me to blog about what they’re doing right, and all the solid reasons to support them during this campaign, I thought: that’ll be kind of nice for a change (and remember that term).

Continue reading “Make change happen: what United Way Ottawa is doing right.”

Is there a bear hiding in your woods? Maybe you can use a little Differ!

The Differ has mentioned his son’s superhero fixation before, viagra order  so imagine his surprise when an expert on these matters confirmed that the little Differ actually has a superpower called “Eye of the Tiger”. And no, this ain’t Smallville or Heroes. This power is very real, very useful in life-threatening situations, and can teach us a lot about the power of seeing things differently.

Continue reading “Eye of the Tiger: my son’s superpower”