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Ted and buzz marketing: Meet Ted, United's Odd Little Friend Let's say you want to start a new airline, and all the obvious names are taken. So you hire a branding firm to come up with something different, funny. For United, the answer came back "Ted." "It's part of United ," points out Sean Donohue, the new "head of Ted." BUT FOR UNITED, Ted is no joke. It's its newest weapon against the low-cost, low-fare carriers like Southwest that keep stealing market share. Starting in February, Ted will fly 106 daily flights, mostly out of Denver. Along with the promised low fares, Ted aims to have a kind of JetBlue style, with "edgier" entertainment, better food and even its own beer. Ted appears to be an answer to Delta Air Lines' funky spinoff, Song, which has performed well in its first eight months. Song's mission is clear: it flies vacation routes to Florida. It behaves like a separate airline and doesn't share Delta's hub system. Song's name was chosen to appeal to women--Delta says women make the travel plans in most households. But some industry analysts find Ted puzzling. Like Song, it's aimed at leisure travelers. But Ted will simply take over some existing United routes. What's more, it will use its parent's Denver hub, so some United passengers may find themselves unwittingly connecting to Ted. "All they're doing is taking a United airplane, repainting it and putting a few more seats on it," says airline consultant Michael Boyd. The only clear winners, according to Boyd: aircraft painters.
Microsoft pushes living-room PCs By Robert A. Guth WALL STREET JOURNAL For years, executives in the consumer-electronics industry have pigeonholed personal computers as office equipment, rather than entertainment centers for the home. The PC is too complicated and fragile, they think, ever to be as widely used as the TV. Microsoft Corp. hopes to change that image when it launched on Tuesday a new breed of living-room PCs developed in a collaboration with hardware makers such as Dell Inc. and Japan's Sony Corp. The new machines will play digital music, videos, games and control personal digital recorders like the popular TiVo all from one remote control. The goal: to capitalize on the explosion of consumer-electronics and digital entertainment by rolling all those functions into one PC. The new PCs, which connect to a TV set, look more like consumer-electronics gear than boxy desktop computers. They are based on a new layer of Microsoft software that works with its Windows XP operating system to allow the systems to be easily controlled remotely. It's not a new idea. The so-called Media Center PCs follow an initial generation of machines, introduced last year, with the same name. But the effort is an important step in a long and crucial march for the Redmond, Wash., software company. With sales of PC hardware and software to businesses slowing, Microsoft is under more pressure to spur PC sales into the home. Microsoft also needs to make sure that the PC, and not some competing gadget, emerges as the command center for an exploding array of home-entertainment options. While Microsoft won't build the appliances, it hopes to profit from a range of software for them, such as programs that manage how securely music is shipped over the Internet and among various devices in the home. The new PCs are "the heart and soul of our consumer computer strategy," says Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin. "There's a whole set of things we are working on." Microsoft and its partners have long promoted their wares for consumers by adding high-speed connections for transferring digital files and software that helps copy and burn digitized songs on PCs. In the living room, however, the PC faces tougher competition where such simple, dedicated devices as game machines, televisions and digital video recorders are a fixture. David Smith, an analyst at Gartner Inc., considers the product "promising" as a consumer device. The new software "puts the PC in a much more competitive position than it was before in the battle with consumer electronics," he says. The new PC systems also are more expensive than many other familiar consumer-electronics products. Sony has two models of the PC under its Vaio brand that are priced at $1,600 and $2,000. The Dell systems, sold under its Dimension brand, will begin selling at $999. There are early signs that growing sales of digital cameras, MP3 digital music players and the increasing numbers of people "burning" home movies into DVDs is creating a more receptive audience for these PCs. For example, Terry Howell, 42 years old, says so far he's used his home PC mostly to surf the Web and for e-mail. But the San Diego resident and father of two says he's taking more of digital photos and also is storing his home movies on DVD. "Within two years I'll be all digital and will probably stop using film altogether." But his wife hasn't yet caught the digital bug, so Howell says he wants a PC that makes it easier to organize digital content. "We would do more if my wife could to it but she's not that computer literate." The advantage of the Media Center PC is that its screen menu is simpler and easier to navigate than a typical PC. Unlike the standard "user interface" of Windows icons, the Media Center PCs display just a few options, such as "My Pictures" and "My Music," accessed by the remote control. In "My Music," PC users can copy music from a CD onto their hard drives and then add it to a list of albums, all by using the remote. The album can be cataloged along with an image of the album's cover.
Nike's buzz marketing vs. Adidas:
Nike swooshes its way into key Marathon advertising site In a bid to trump competitor Adidas, sponsor of the Boston Marathon, Nike Inc. is combining guerrilla marketing and a technique called ''station domination'' at a subway stop near the finish line that long-distance runners hope to cross April 15. At the Back Bay MBTA station, Nike has rented all available ad space. By the T's count, that's 82 spaces, including overhead banners and wall placards. The work went up March 15, two weeks before adidas planned to unveil its own ''station domination'' at the Park Street T stop. Nike's ads slyly allude to the Boston Marathon, an event that Nike has no official ties to. Boston Athletic Association, the Marathon's organizer, expressed disappointment but not surprise at Nike's actions. Nike has a reputation for guerrilla marketing, said BAA executive director Guy L. Morse. In these parts, Nike's marketing around the Marathon has almost become as much a rite of spring as high hopes for the Red Sox. A year ago, Nike said it took out ads on 300 taxi tops; two years ago, it blanketed Park Street station with ads. Said Morse, ''In my opinion, it can be disappointing and offensive when someone takes advantage of the Boston Marathon without paying for the privilege.'' Around April 1, adidas plans to start its own Marathon marketing efforts, which include ads at Park Street station, wrapping T trolleys in adidas messaging, and billboard ads. MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said that Nike paid the company that sells the T's ad space $75,000 for its monthlong station-domination program at Back Bay and that adidas will pay $100,000 to make Park Street a shrine for its brand, an amount that adidas disputed. When it came to T stops, ''we had first choice,'' said Chris Jenks, director of brand marketing at adidas America. Asked about Nike, he said, ''We can't control what other people do.'' Jenks said adidas won't disclose the specific content of its Marathon ads until their unveiling. Adidas is well known for soccer. In its ongoing marketing efforts, adidas looks to alert US consumers that its ''innovative'' technologies and designs are equally applicable to its basketball and running shoes, Jenks said. As for the Nike ads in Back Bay, the Nike name is never mentioned, and its swoosh logo is shown about 10 times. There are references to April 15, the date of the race, but not the Boston Marathon. Ads are mostly photos of runners, and they're captioned with the thoughts that might go through the runner's mind during a race. Among the captions: ''Pray for a tailwind.'' ''If it goes bad, I'll call it a workout.'' The campaign is as much about establishing a bond with serious runners as it is about gaining more brand exposure, said Jim Jennings, a Nike marketing manager. ''This is our way of getting Boston excited about the race and letting them know Nike is excited about the race,'' he said. ''Our objective is to be there for the runners. It's to inspire them and support them. And it's also about learning from them.'' Two ads in the campaign might give a bluenose a bad case of the vapors. In one, the caption of a woman runner in obvious discomfort is, ''Where can I pee?'' A caption under a male runner is, ''Bloody nipples are a trophy.'' To date, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has received no complaints about the ads. Given the full context of the campaign, it was deemed that they were not inappropriate, Pesaturo said.
Budweiser and buzz marketing: A-B's Budweiser launches new short films on Web site Anheuser Busch Cos. Inc.'s Budweiser brand has launched two new short films on its Web site. "The Company Man" and "Gas, Food, Beer," short films, or long-form commercials, can be seen at www.budweiser.com. The short films integrate Budweiser into humorous situations faced by adult consumers, the company said. Andy Goeler, director of Budweiser marketing, said the company believes the short films are an efficient form of marketing, as the company can use portions of each film to develop standard 30-second commercials. Last November, the company formed a partnership with actor Kevin Spacey's TriggerStreet.com, a Web-based community that showcases new talent and original short films. St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. (NYSE: BUD) is the world's largest brewer, manufactures and recycles aluminum cans and operates theme parks.
Coke and buzz marketing:
GPS will pinpoint Coke prize winners ATLANTA -- Here's a way to really target a consumer. Next summer, Coca-Cola plans to use satellites to find U.S. buyers who happen to purchase special cans of Coke products. They will be winners in a giveaway that will feature Hummer H2 sport-utility vehicles. The giant vehicles will be presented in person, using satellites to locate the recipients. And in a promotion tied to the Summer Olympics, Coke's prize is likely to be $1 million in gold, again awarded on the spot. The promotions, described in a proposal that has been circulated within the Coke system, are a twist for the beverage maker, because of both the technology involved and the splashy prizes. Coke spokesman Mart Martin declined to provide details about the promotions, which remain months away. "We are still in the process of finalizing our plans," he said. But U.S. Coke bottlers have learned quite a bit about them. Last week in Australia, Coke unveiled a similar plan. Dubbed Thrill Seeker, it is tied to the Rugby World Cup finals, scheduled for October and November. Thrill Seeker uses satellite tracking to locate winners. The prizes are Peugeot cars and $10,000. Summertime prizes are common in the soft-drink world, given that they help stir interest during an important selling season. This year's summer promotion from Pepsi, for example, touted a potential prize of $1 billion. (It wasn't won, by the way.) The oddity of Coke's promotion revolves around how winners will get their prizes. The cans used will be equipped with Global Positioning System transponders. In Canada, Coors used a "Tracker Bottle" in Quebec in 2001 and 2002. The program spread to all of Canada last summer. That experience should indicate the tracking system will work. Coke doesn't want a repeat of 1990, when the much-touted "Magic Can" promotion turned out to be a mess. In that case, Coke put cash in cans, but many malfunctioned.
Buzz marketing providing alternatives to traditional agency costs?
Survey on Client - Agency Relations The latest results from a closely followed annual survey of advertiser-agency relations would most likely give pause to even the most persistent Pollyanna. In the survey, to be released today, many measurements intended to assess the strength, effectiveness and amity of the relationships between agencies and clients are at or near record lows. The consequences are serious, according to the survey, because they contribute to a waning belief in the efficacy of advertising among marketers -- an ominous trend for agencies, whether led by optimists or pessimists. The primary culprit for the increased tensions, the survey reported, is the economy, which is in its third year of disappointing Madison Avenue with setbacks like reduced client spending and increased layoffs. "Everything comes back to the economy," said Nancy L. Salz, president of Nancy L. Salz Consulting in New York, which has sponsored the survey since 1986. "It's a tough, tough world out there," Ms. Salz said, "tough for both sides." Asked when results might start to improve, Ms. Salz replied, "Who knows?" Indeed, a survey recently released by the American Advertising Federation in Washington echoed her uncertainty. While 54 percent of the top advertising executives surveyed by the federation said the industry was slowly recovering from its prolonged slump, they also said they doubted that strong growth would come anytime soon. Ten percent of those responding to the federation survey said they thought that while the industry's decline had reached bottom, any recovery was uncertain. Only 16 percent of respondents said they thought the industry was recovering well and anticipated strong growth. In reviewing the results of the 2003 Salz Survey of Advertiser-Agency Relations, as the Salz study is formally titled, Ms. Salz said the principal difference was that "last year, agencies were feeling the effects of the economy more than advertisers, but now, the advertisers have caught up -- or `caught down' -- to the agencies." When advertisers were asked how much sales could improve if their agencies were always able to do the best possible work, the mean figure the respondents gave was 20.8 percent. That was the third-lowest figure recorded for that question since the survey began, behind only the 20.2 percent of 1989 and the 20.4 percent of last year. As recently as 2001, the figure was as high as 27.7 percent. "It's two years in a row of lower expectations among advertisers of what advertising can do for them," said Ms. Salz, whose company offers training seminars on advertising development and agency relations for marketers like American Express, Clorox, the T-Mobile division of Deutsche Telekom and Toyota Motor. Also, when advertisers were asked to rate the quality of work from their agencies on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 as high, the mean rating remained low, at 7.2. While that was a slight improvement from the 7.1 registered last year, it was still a comedown from the record of 7.5 set in 1986 and matched in 1996. On the other side, when agency executives were asked for the percentage of major clients for which they were they able to do their best work, the response was 56.6 percent. Not only was that a historically low figure, it represented a significant decline from the response last year of 69 percent, which also happened to be the record high figure for the question since the survey began. The increasing discord between advertisers and agencies is also evident in the responses to questions that both sides were asked. For instance, when asked whether there was more teamwork in their relationships than last year, 50 percent of the advertisers agreed and only 29 percent of the agencies agreed. That gap was the largest for the question since 1999 and an increase of 16 percentage points from last year, when 46 percent of advertisers agreed and 41 percent of agencies agreed. When both sides were asked whether there was more of a focus on money issues in their relationships than last year, 61 percent of the advertisers agreed, the highest figure by far for that question, and an increase of 12 percentage points from last year -- and 29 points since 2000. By comparison, when agencies were asked the same question, 77 percent agreed there was more of a focus on money issues than last year, a slight rise from the 76 percent figure in the 2002 survey. "I know marketers are very concerned about what they're paying their agencies," Ms. Salz said, "but there are some things they can also do internally to reduce costs" rather than dwell on the issue with the agencies and risk intensifying the tensions as well as diminishing the ability to work together to create effective ads. And when both advertisers and agencies were asked whether the agencies were more focused on client needs than last year, only 30 percent of advertisers agreed, "the lowest number in 10 years," Ms. Salz said, and down sharply from the 49 percent figure registered in the 2002 survey. When the agencies responded to the same question, 59 percent this year agreed, compared with 52 percent last year. That means a slight difference of 3 percentage points has widened in a year to a chasmlike 29 percentage points. Despite the fact the survey "does not reveal a pretty picture this year," Ms. Salz said, she found some encouraging results. For example, advertisers and agencies agreed that the costs to develop ads would decline if they could work together more productively, with the advertisers estimating a savings of 17 percent and the agencies a savings of 23.5 percent. And both sides agreed that the major reasons for higher ad-development costs could be found in the executive suites of the advertisers rather than the agencies. Among the problems both cited: too many rounds of creative revisions, too many approval levels for creative changes and too many disagreements about strategy as well as the creative elements of the ads. The survey was conducted in May for Salz by Thurm Marketing and Consulting in Princeton, N.J.
Reebok and buzz marketing:
THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING; The Reebok campaign joins the California campaign. Lester Spreight, the actor who plays Terry Tate in Reebok's television commercials, has entered the now comical race for governor of California. Reebok, on behalf of Spreight, filed official documents yesterday. In support of the candidate, Reebok has created a promotional web site, along with the tagline "Save our state - vote Terry Tate." The now farcical race, including Gary Coleman, Leo Gallagher and the former Leo Burnett creative known as Father Guido Sarducci, will certainly provide Reebok with a vast amount of free publicity, but there may come a time when Californians start to tire of being an electoral mockery. A Reebok spokesman told the Times that people who felt the campaign an insult to democracy "are not part of the target audience." Florida must be enjoying this.
Make believe with buzz marketing:
Make-believe Ad on 'Sex and the City' Creates Real-Life Sensation It was enough to make elegant ladies across the country spit out their martinis in shock when HBO's "Sex in the City" featured this parody ad for Absolut Hunk. The ad spoof has already prompted Absolut to name a drink after it and sparked an online viral clamor looking for copies of the ad.
BW Online | July 30, 2001 | Buzz Marketing Businessweek By Gerry Khermouch ... Buzz Marketing. ... The slightly subversive, slightly underground techniques that form the basis of buzz marketing have been building in popularity for a few years. ... Description: Article on "stealth" marketing technique cites example of Brown and Williamson and other tobacco companies. Frequent the right cafes in Sunset Plaza, Melrose, or the Third Street Promenade in and around Los Angeles this summer, and you're likely to encounter a gang of sleek, impossibly attractive motorbike riders who seem genuinely interested in getting to know you over an iced latte. Compliment them on their Vespa scooters glinting in the brilliant curbside sunlight, and they'll happily pull out a pad and scribble down an address and phone number--not theirs, but that of the local "boutique" where you can buy your own Vespa, just as (they'll confide) the rap artist Sisqó and the movie queen Sandra Bullock recently did. And that's when the truth hits you: This isn't any spontaneous encounter. Those scooter-riding models are on the Vespa payroll, and they've been hired to generate some favorable word of mouth for the recently reissued European bikes. Welcome to the Summer of Buzz. This season, it seems, marketers are taking to the streets, as well as cafés, nightclubs, and the Internet, in record numbers. Vespa importer Piaggio USA has its biker gang. Hebrew National is dispatching "mom squads" to grill up its hot dogs in backyard barbecues, while Hasbro Games has deputized hundreds of fourth- and fifth-graders as "secret agents" to tantalize their peers with Hasbro's new POX electronic game. Their goal: to seek out the trendsetters in each community and subtly push them into talking up their brand to their friends and admirers. By orchestrating a tsunami of chatter, marketers are hoping to replicate the pattern set by such overnight sensations as independent film The Blair Witch Project, the Harry Potter book series, and Razor kick scooters. In each case, buzz that seemed to come from out of nowhere transformed what otherwise would have been a niche product into a mass phenomenon. This is the new world of buzz marketing, where brand come-ons sometimes are veiled to the point of opacity and where it is the consumers themselves who are lured into doing the heavy lifting of spreading the message. Sure, generating great buzz for their products has been the holy grail in marketing circles since P.T. Barnum learned to work a crowd. But the art of generating word-of-mouth has grown far more sophisticated since the early days of simple publicity stunts. Marketers are learning to turn their brands into carefully guarded secrets that are revealed to a knowing few in each community, who in turn tell a few more, who tell a few more, and so on. Rather than blitzing the airways with 30-second TV commercials for its new Focus subcompact, Ford Motor Co. (F ) recruited just a handful of trendsetters in a few markets and gave them each a Focus to drive for six months. Their duties? Simply to be seen with the car and to hand out Focus-themed trinkets to anyone who expressed interest in it. "We weren't looking for celebrities. We were looking for the assistants to celebrities, party planners, disk jockeys--the people who really seemed to influence what was cool," says Julie Roehm, who implemented the program as Ford Div. car-marketing communications manager and is plotting other buzz forays since moving to a marketing job at DaimlerChrysler (DCX ). The slightly subversive, slightly underground techniques that form the basis of buzz marketing have been building in popularity for a few years. But now a confluence of factors has helped to make buzz more attractive than ever. For one thing, buzz is cheap. There are no national media buys and no expensive creative components. In a period of budget chopping, cheap is good. Then there's the rise of the Internet, which means marketers can reach just about anyone in almost any guise they care to assume. Finally, buzz marketing attempts to make each encounter with a consumer look like a unique, serendipitous event. That's appealing to the desired twentysomethings, who remain skeptical of traditional mass advertising. So how does it work? In a successful campaign, each carefully cultivated recipient of the brand message becomes a powerful carrier, spreading the word to yet more carriers, much as a virus rampages through a given population. "We're arming consumers with the tools or knowledge they can take back to their peer groups so they'll be perceived as being in the know," says Scott Stern, senior vice-president at Bates USA, who developed a buzz campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes. "Ultimately, the brand benefits because an accepted member of the social circle will always be far more credible than any communication that could ever come directly from the brand." The initial contact may look spontaneous, but it's anything but. Buzz campaigns are meticulously planned and the results carefully measured. Marketers are even attempting to quantify how often their message will be passed along and how many downstream consumers they need to influence before a fad is born. VF Corp. last summer contacted 200,000 carefully selected Web surfers in the opening foray of a buzz campaign for its Lee Dungarees. Within four months, 436,000 visitors had made their way to a specially created game site. But for companies used to carefully controlling their message, buzz marketing can put them on unfamiliar and risky ground. Measuring the reach of a buzz campaign has nowhere near the precision of AC Nielsen Corp. (ART ) ratings or cost-per-thousand magazine subscribers. And while buzz may work for products with a heavy dose of fashion, there's skepticism that it will translate to more prosaic categories such as paper towels and breakfast cereal. Whether it works for a broad array of products or not, there is also the risk that buzz will simply be overdone, losing its power to capture attention by becoming too familiar. This summer's profusion of buzz efforts certainly will test that proposition. Sometimes the tactics can be downright dangerous. Staid IBM (IBM ) ran afoul of the law in April after one of its agencies stenciled wordless images of a peace symbol, heart, and penguin on Chicago and San Francisco sidewalks to build buzz for its "Peace Love Linux" effort behind the open-source software. True, the resulting avalanche of media coverage did more than expensive paid ads could have to bring attention to IBM's Linux effort, but Big Blue's portrayal as a corporate vandal may not have been the image it was looking for. Indeed, some critics of advertising are decrying buzz marketing as a form of cultural corruption at a time when advertising already pervades the landscape. "It's a much more insidious kind of development, because now, all of a sudden, marketers are creating culture on the grassroots level, on the streets and in the places people live," says Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine and an orchestrator of "media democracy" protests against multinational marketers. Despite the risks, more and more major marketers are trying their hands at the technique, unable to resist the chance to imbue their brands with an aura of cutting-edge cool. When DaimlerChrysler wanted to generate some prelaunch buzz for its PT Cruiser, it seeded the striking-looking roadsters in rental-car fleets around trendy Miami Beach, then let the grapevine do its work. Beer importer Guinness Bass Import offered a precious handful of custom-designed "Kegerator" home-tapping systems to Hollywood stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, hoping they would drop hints of their Guinness Stout habit to their friends and hangers-on. Even packaged-goods colossus Procter & Gamble has been plotting buzz-marketing forays--which it refers to as "diffusion marketing"--as part of a broader push to reinvigorate its stable of staid brands. It sought to get Canadian consumers talking about Cheer detergent by having brightly outfitted "shoppers" break into impromptu fashion shows in supermarkets, with nary a hard sell for the detergent. (The actors did mention that their duds were washed with Cheer.) ONE STEP AHEAD. Building a successful buzz campaign hinges on finding the right carriers for the message: influencers who are obsessed with staying one step ahead of their peers. That was Ford's strategy last year when it sought to interest a new generation of buyers in its humdrum but well-established Escort with a new $13,000 version of the subcompact called the Focus. Ford executives figured a word-of-mouth foray might position the Focus as a hip, young person's car and help it win what Ford Div. President James G. O'Connor styles the "buzz war" against the small-car leader, Honda Motor Co.'s Civic. To kick-start the buzz, Ford (F ) tapped...120 influential young consumers in five key markets: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. Each of the 120 people was given a Focus to drive for six months and was asked to keep a record of where they took the car and what they did. The gambit worked on Joe Regner, a 21-year-old operations engineer in Miami. Regner spotted a yellow Focus in the parking lot as he cruised by hip-hop radio station WEDR 99 Jamz and he pulled over to get a closer look. It turned out to be a loaner to Jill Tracey, one of Regner's favorite deejays. "It was so cool, I took pictures and really checked it out," he says. While waiting to order a special, high-performance version of the Focus called the SVT that's due out this fall, Regner persuaded his girlfriend, Eli Dominguez, a legal assistant, to scrap plans to buy a Civic in favor of a Focus ZX3. With enthusiasts like Regner as an unpaid sales force, Ford was able to get the Focus off to a brisk start, selling 286,166 units in its first full year, 2000--and outselling the Civic in some recent months. Of course, the kind of person marketers look for to ignite buzz depends on the product. ConAgra Foods' Hebrew National unit searched 12 cities for 250 PTA presidents, Hispanic community leaders, and, yes, Jewish mothers to serve on its "mom squads" this summer. The recruits are driving around in sport-utility vehicles emblazoned with a Hebrew National logo, hosting backyard hot-dog barbecues, and passing out discount coupons at community events. "I used to think only outrageous products were worthy of viral marketing," says Mark Kleinman, vice-president of sales and marketing. "But even a loved American food like the hot dog can generate a lot of discussion and a viral build." It's not hard to see why major marketers are open to experimentation. Expensive, conventional approaches such as network-TV ads seem less and less able to move the needle. That's particularly true when it comes to younger consumers, who because they are still forming their brand preferences, are coveted by marketers. They spend less time planted in front of the tube and are more skeptical about the messages they receive there. Besides, some products or services are so complex, it's hard to get the message across in a 30-second commercial. While traditional ad campaigns have lost some of their punch, examples of quirkier campaigns that have generated huge grassroots followings for their brands with laughably low marketing expenditures abound. Blair Witch, the independent film phenomenon of two years ago, was one of the biggest, but there have been others. Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, a novel of female empowerment in a Biblical setting, languished for two years until Diamant had the inspiration of blanket-mailing free copies to hundreds of female Reform rabbis. That unleashed a storm of word-of-mouth buzz, and Tent soon landed on best-seller lists. Then there was the obscure Taiwanese import, Razor scooters, that deftly worked the online and offline grapevines to become a must-have toy among both kids and grownups. Is it merely lightning striking? To some extent, yes: Each item was the right, unique property at the right time. What has fascinated marketers, though, is how the consumers who are first to climb aboard become ardent proselytizers. "It's sort of like a good word-of-mouth movie. It's the only way to get something going with that kind of acceleration," says Razor USA LLC President Carlton Calvin. But buzz is no longer a hit-or-miss proposition used exclusively by fringe marketers. These days, plenty of big players are trying hard to systematize buzz techniques. Their efforts got a big theoretical lift from Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, which brought home how a small number of consumers--if they're the right ones--can turn a grass fire into a conflagration. Gladwell traced how a handful of hipsters patronizing the thrift shops of Manhattan's Lower East Side were able to "tip" Wolverine's Hush Puppies shoes into a national revival. FICTIONAL AUTEURS. Now even ad agencies that are heavily invested in traditional brand-building techniques acknowledge that buzz marketing has become a phenomenon. "Everybody's read The Tipping Point and is trying to figure out what are the underground streams to reach consumers," acknowledges Edward H. Meyer, chairman, president, and CEO of Grey Global Group Inc. (GREY ). "Everybody is experimenting with it." Even one of the more freewheeling and influential efforts to date, the one behind Lee Dungarees, was driven by the most pragmatic considerations and was meticulously planned. VF, of Greensboro, N.C., had managed in recent years to renovate the image of its stodgy Lee jeans brand among younger consumers but felt it could do more to convert that cooler image into traffic at teen-toxic retailers like J.C. Penney (JCP ) and Sears Roebuck (S ), its biggest outlets. Working with ad agency Fallon McElligott, VF came up with a solution that played on the weakness for video games and computers of its target customers, males 17 to 22. First, VF culled a list of 200,000 "influential" guys from a list of Web surfers and zapped them a trio of grainy video clips that were hilarious in their apparent naivete. They purported to be ultralow-budget flicks, meant to draw visitors to the Web sites of auteurs such as open-shirted Curry, a 23-year-old race-car driver. To the high school and college-age Web surfers who received them, the clips would have seemed like delicious examples of the oddball digital detritus that litters the Web. So not many of the recipients who eagerly zapped the quick flicks to their friends would have guessed that they actually were abetting an elaborate marketing campaign orchestrated by Lee. The "stupid little films," as agency President David Lubars describes them, intrigued their recipients enough to be forwarded to, on average, six friends apiece, according to VF research. (Fallon executives say they knew firsthand that the effort was igniting when they started receiving the viral e-mails themselves from friends who had no idea that Fallon was involved with the effort.) Despite virtually no advertising, some 100,000 unique visitors stormed the fictional auteurs' Web sites the week they went live, crashing the server. As with other such viral efforts, "we created a little community: You either knew about it or not," says Lubars. The marketing connection only became clear a few months later, after a TV and radio ad blitz finally revealed the three characters to be fictional antagonists developed as part of an online computer game. And that was a key to the program: To play the game at an advanced level, participants had to snag the product identification numbers--er, the "secret code"--off Lee items, which of course required a visit to a store. Ultimately, the effort drove thousands of kids age 17 to 22 into the stores and helped propel Lee sales upward by 20% last year. Of course, if the viral effort had just been a lead-in to a conventional ad barrage for Lee Dungarees, not much would have been accomplished. After the covert come-on, an ad blitz might even have created a backlash. Instead, VF kept the commercial aspect to a bare minimum. The most overt connection with the brand was in structuring the game so that participants had to go to retailers to snag the code off the pants. "You have to be careful not to sell too hard because that's a total turn-off to young adults," explains Kathy Collins, Lee Jeans' vice-president for marketing. But the line between being clever and being deceptive can be a hard one for marketers to navigate. Sony Pictures Entertainment (SNE ) generated the kind of publicity you wouldn't especially want to have when a couple of recent buzz strategies backfired. First, it turned out that Sony had fabricated quotes from a fictitious film critic praising movies such as Vertical Limit and The Animal. Soon after, two supposed moviegoers who gushed about The Patriot in Sony commercials were unmasked as studio employees. Rather than delighting or surprising, the ham-handed efforts merely confirmed consumers' worst suspicions about marketers. "It can turn into a horrible public-relations nightmare if it turns out you're deceiving people," says Christopher Ireland, CEO of Cheskin Research, which explores youth culture for clients such as PepsiCo Inc. (PEP ) and Motorola Inc. (MOT ). "ENORMOUSLY BELIEVABLE." Some of the most successful practitioners of buzz marketing include alcohol and tobacco advertisers. Long excluded from mass media, they have an obvious interest in making any sort of buzz work. Consider Lucky Strike, an all-but-dead brand that's hemmed in by ever-tightening restrictions on cigarette advertising, merchandising, sampling, and promotions. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. and its ad agency, Bates, decided to add buzz to Lucky Strike's equation. The result was the Lucky Strike Force, attractive couples working trendy neighborhoods such as Miami's South Beach, New York's Soho, and Santa Monica, Calif., proffering hot coffee and cell-phone calls to shivering smokers in winter or iced coffee and lounge chairs in spring and summer. "Send up a smoke signal, and we'll be there," local teaser ads urged. The Strike Force has helped the onetime icon edge back toward broad availability. "As a marketer, you hope to have your consumer do your marketing for you," explains Sharon Smith, director of Lucky Strike. "It is credible, less expensive, and enormously believable." A buzz campaign for a quirky, narrow-market car like the Focus or a moribund cigarette brand is one thing. Using the viral strategy in more humdrum categories is something else altogether. P&G's strutting shoppers aside, buzz marketing still seems to work best for the relatively narrow range of products and services that consumers care deeply about, whether because of their physical intimacy, technical complexity, or status-enhancing potential. "The bad news is that [buzz marketing] only works in high-interest product categories," says Peter Sealey, a former Coca-Cola Co. (KO ) marketer who is an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. "For the next BMW or Ford's reintroduction of the Thunderbird, I absolutely would use buzz, because there's going to be a cult following. For laundry detergent or the next flavor of Snapple, not a chance."
By Gerry Khermouch in New York, with Jeff Green in Detroit
Buzz marketing in Baltimore:
Through the grapevine: PR firms tout buzz marketing On a mild day in early May, an ad agency dispatched a throng of young, T-shirted volunteers throughout Baltimore City, Md., who urged any passer-by who would listen to sign a document pledging not to use illegal drugs. Days later, another horde of about 20 employees from a local agency flooded the area around Lexington Market to do market research, while an SUV wrapped in the logos of local retailer Downtown Locker Room and Mountain Dew soft drink snaked its way through city streets. Neither of the two so-called "street-teams" were employed by the same company, nor was the decaled SUV related to them. But all three are part of a growing sector of marketing that forgoes traditional creative efforts and media buys in favor of cheap, in-your-face tactics that take advertisers' messages directly to the consumer -- very directly. Welcome to "guerrilla" or buzz marketing. "Other than a piece of direct mail, guerrilla marketing is the ultimate way to do that. It's getting into the people's faces so they cannot get away from the message we're trying to give them." It's also a good way to cut costs. "You talk about doing radio or TV, it's $300 to $1,000 per spot, and that's just for one 30-second spot," said Craig Powell, marketing director for Downtown Locker Room, an Owings Mills, Md.-based chain that sells urban fashions. "Using guerrilla marketing is by far the cheaper method." In fact, guerrilla marketing came about as a means for companies to cheaply undercut others' marketing efforts, said Peter Shih, executive vice president of marketing and communications at the Washington, D.C.-based American Advertising Federation. "Guerrilla marketing started about 20 years ago from sports marketing," Shih said. "What would happen is somebody would spend a lot of money to sponsor an event, and someone else would figure out how to do it on the cheap. During the Olympic games, you had one sneaker company who was the major sponsor, and another who set up billboards around the whole place and was giving away their merchandise to some of the athletes. "If you're talking about $20 [million] or $35 million in sponsorship rights, that's a lot of money to save," he said.
Keep Up With the Buzz On Buzz Marketing by Alf Nucifora This is a difficult time for marketers. Marketing communications, in most forms, particularly advertising, is both expensive and playing to marketplace increasingly weighted down with clutter. There are too many messages being broadcast too often, with diminishing impact on the consumer. This situation grows even more acute in the case of the Gen X and Y segments. While these groups are still highly susceptible to brand influence, they show signs of being more cynical in their response to the marketing message and are eager to acquire brand news and information from less traditional sources. Enter Buzz Marketing It's a combination of a number of influences including good old word-of-mouth (WOM), viral marketing, and the current fixation on early trend setting and spotting. Buzz marketing works because it is both interruptive and yet subversive. It's marketing's Trojan horse and its growing acceptance is evidenced by the fact that some of the world's most authoritative marketers have now entered the field. As online marketing newsletter ICONOCAST notes, "To get clients to spend on fringe ideas, agencies are creating buzz marketing units. An example is MindShare's WOW Factory, which is characterized as a group of people dedicated to surprise." Buzz marketing, and its earlier incarnation, word-of-mouth have been around for some time. Record companies and fashion-related brands are notorious for some of their stunts. In the case of the liquor industry, it was not uncommon to have paid agents provocateur visit trendy bars, order the brand of choice (normally an unknown foreign import from the white spirits family) and strike up conversations with both barkeeps and customers in order to establish cool buzz for the brand. And in many cases it worked. Formerly unknown brands acquired hip acceptance and generated volume growth without the necessity of an outrageously expensive advertising or marketing budget. Even today the process continues. Abercrombie & Fitch, the national chain that primarily retails to the college crowd, creates and lives by what Potentials Magazine terms, fake controversies "in which the company creates a storm of controversy around the brand name, apologizes (or not) for any offense then sits back and watches as curious shoppers react." Recently, A&F promoted t-shirts with a risky racial slant (example: Two oriental men accompanied by the slogan "Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wong's Can Make It White"). The offense prompted protests, complaining phone calls and e-mails forcing the t-shirt line to be pulled. This was followed by a corporate apology. But was the whole affair deliberate? The company isn't saying. You be the judge. Finally, let's not forget the most recent example of "Yours is a very bad hotel," a PowerPoint presentation developed by two disgruntled travelers that was initially forwarded to five friends but since then has been passed around virally on the Internet to an estimated audience in excess of a million. The presentation, which hit a nerve with the downtrodden, traveling public, has been the subject of articles in a number of national magazines and newspapers, has generated its own discussion Web cast and is now taught as a case study in business schools. It proves the point that when buzz touches a topic or product of compelling interest it can be an extremely effective way to spread the news without incurring much expense.
Best Buzz Marketing Business 2.0 By Stephen Fenichell, May 2002 Issue On Dec. 3, with just over a month to go before the second-season premiere of the gay TV drama Queer as Folk, the official countdown began. Fans could follow along on an interactive ad unit known as the Countdown Ticker, which struck off, in real time, the weeks, days, hours, and minutes remaining until the episode's release on the Showtime cable network Jan. 6. Far more interesting than the technology, however, was its placement: More than 650 gay and lesbian websites, ranging from the well-trafficked (GayWired.com) to the obscure (www.swezy.net), carried the ticker for free. The viral marketing strategy, capitalizing on a close-knit audience and integrated with an extensive offline campaign, helped build buzz to such a pitch that the episode was the most heavily watched event in Showtime's 25-year history. Jordan Berman, online marketing manager for Showtime, conceived the countdown campaign as the solution to a fairly high-stakes assignment: to generate even greater buzz than the show had received in its first season, when it had become a hit in the gay community and Showtime's marquee series. Our Sweet Spot judges' comments are one indication of just how well Berman succeeded: Calling it "a brilliant use of community" and "wonderfully executed," they gave the campaign an average score of 7.0 out of 10 for Best Buzz Marketing. For QAF's first season, in 2001, Berman orchestrated what he now describes in a faintly derisive tone as "a fairly large conventional online media buy" -- mostly banner ads on popular gay and lesbian websites. This time, he was convinced he could find a more effective way to reach his audience. Inspiration struck last fall when Berman typed "queer as folk" into a Google search engine. What popped up was amazing. He found "literally hundreds of websites devoted in part or in whole to the show. The question became not so much how to generate more buzz," he says, "but how best to harness the buzz that was already out there." Working in concert with Freestyle Interactive, Berman e-mailed the webmasters of the sites he'd found in his Google search and invited them to post the Countdown Ticker. In exchange, they would receive a CD sound track and be entered into a sweepstakes to win QAF's first season on DVD. In one month, the Countdown Ticker was seen by more than 1 million viewers and clicked on by about 10,000. (The clickthrough brought visitors to QAF's website, where they could view video clips, read interviews, and so on.) But the real brilliance of Showtime's outreach, says Sweet Spot judge Marc Schiller, is its long-lasting impact. "It builds future relationships with the webmasters in such an intimate way," he says, "it's like a goodwill account that they can draw on for years."
Powering A Sales Lift-Off A successfully targeted campaign expands Southwest Airlines' African American customer base By Richard Churchill A woman raves about her friend's beautifully redecorated bathroom, all the while poking furtively through the medicine cabinet, confident that the friend, who is several rooms away, will never be the wiser. Just as the woman gingerly puts the last bottle back in place however, the cabinet crashes into the sink, leaving her with a fine mess to explain. "Wanna Get Away?," intones Southwest Airlines' famous tagline, then the spot segues into an announcement of new value fares. Even snoops can get away inexpensively. Known for its low fares and off-beat humor, Southwest has been poking fun with its Wanna Get Away campaign for three years. Behind all the laughs, however, is a serious approach to targeting potential customers. "Our goal is to become the preferred airline in each city that we serve," says Joyce Rogge, vice president of marketing. In 24 of the 59 markets Southwest serves, that translates into a carefully honed campaign to reach African Americans, who dominate the local demographics. When Southwest decided to expand the focus on the African American market in 1997, it looked for a celebrity spokesperson to connect with the community. It quickly hooked up with Tom Joyner, one of radio's leading morning men whose show is heard in more than 100 markets. "Tom had the reputation of being the hardest worker on the air," recalls Rogge, "and we soon knew why." Joyner's style is not just to broadcast to the African American community, but to broadcast from it, on location, as often as possible. "Tom does about 30 road shows a year, and last year, 21 were in Southwest's service area," Rogge says. The airline became the sponsor of many of these traveling broadcasts, dubbing them The Tom Joyner Southwest Airlines Sky Shows. Southwest benefited from the fact that Joyner's road trips encompass much more than remote broadcasts. While in town, Joyner gives interviews, makes appearances and invites special guests to perform on his show, which airs during morning drive time. Realizing how well the Sky Shows were working, Southwest signed Joyner to anchor its African American initiatives in print and television. These included spots on cable. "When we began advertising on BET in 1997, we knew we had an instant connection with our audience," says Kristy Brownlow-King, Southwest's senior specialist for multicultural marketing. The airline started out with spots in BET's primetime, but expanded its schedule the following year, adding sponsorship of the network's Black College Football Classic telecasts. The Classic includes five regular games plus a championship match. Southwest sponsors games played in its cities: the State Fair Classic in Dallas, the Capital City Classic in Jackson and the granddaddy of them all, The Bayou Classic from New Orleans. To enhance its Classic sponsorship last fall, Southwest partnered with BET, Pizza Hut and Disney in a sweepstakes connected with the games that awarded a vacation in Orlando. The sweepstakes expanded Southwest's campaign to the Internet: Consumers could only register at BET.com or Southwest.com. "With each opportunity we always look for ways to extend it with promotions," explains Rogge. "We use celebrity and image components as well as value and Internet components." The connection with BET's Black College Football Classic coverage dovetailed nicely with Southwest's general market campaign, which includes a presence in National Football League games on both broadcast and ESPN. Both the Classic and the NFL reach big audiences of men aged 25-54, a key target demographic for the airline. The Wanna Get Away creative includes some spots that air in the general market as well as the African American campaign. One spot features a football referee getting ready to open a game. As he briefs the teams' captains, he rummages through his pockets, obviously looking for something. Finally, a sheepish look on his face, he calls out: "Does anyone have change for a dollar?" In another spot, a band finishes its closing song to cheers and applause from the audience. The lead singer belts out "Thank you Detroit, we love you!," but an immediate hush falls over the audience. A side musician turns to the leader and whispers "Detroit was last night." Over the past four years, Southwest's budget for African American initiatives has jumped 325 percent. Most of the increases came in the first two years and were due not just to the radio and BET initiatives but to a cross section of community initiatives. These range from a presence in Chicago's annual Bud Billiken Parade, the largest African American parade in the country, to sponsoring Black History Month in February and Black Music Month in June. This year, Southwest is adding several new BET initiatives, including a relationship with The Bobby Jones Gospel Hour. That partnership will include spots in the show and a Southwest presence at a number of concerts, including Washington D.C.'s Southwest Airlines Bobby Jones Gospel Music Fest, the Bobby Jones Gospel Artist Retreat in Las Vegas and a Bobby Jones Christmas Special, originated in Nashville. To Southwest's Rogge, BET has become more than an advertising vehicle. "When we commit ourselves to a plan, we don't do things halfway," she says. "We started advertising on BET because we wanted to reach the African American market, but very soon it turned into a partnership as we found them to be just as interested in enhancing and extending the programs with promotional tie-ins as we are."
Bad Will Hunting, Armed With Venom Darts By BRUCE WEBER Is there anyone who isn't sick of Ben Affleck, with his J.Lo and his "Gigli" and the salaams he elicits when he deigns to show up in "Project Greenlight"? To me, his pal Matt Damon is easier to take, partly because he doesn't seem quite such a sellout and a glory hog and partly because his talent is more than skin deep. But I'm not a young actor puzzled, exasperated and moved to vindictiveness by the good fortune that has descended collectively on the two childhood friends from Boston after they wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay "Good Will Hunting" and appeared in it. Brenda Withers and Mindy Kaling, former Dartmouth classmates now in their mid-20's, are. In "Matt & Ben," their deliciously spiteful sendup of Hollywood's naked emperors in general and Mr. Damon and Mr. Affleck in particular, they play the title characters on the very brink of their fame. In Ms. Kaling and Ms. Withers's version of the story, however, "Good Will Hunting" wasn't written by Mr. Affleck and Mr. Damon. It literally fell, a manuscript fully composed and wrapped in brown paper, from the ceiling into Mr. Affleck's collegiate-style apartment while the two aspiring stars were engaged in a whole other project: adapting "Catcher in the Rye" for the movies. The play, at P.S. 122 in the East Village, depicts the two guys as competitive knuckleheads: Ben (Ms. Kaling) is the vacuous good-time guy, Matt the unbearably earnest do-right. As they debate whether to take their gift from the movie gods as their own, the play makes intermittent flashbacks to tell their history. We see, for example, Matt singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and accompanying himself on guitar for the high school talent show, only to be upstaged by Ben, whose Tom Smothers-like interruptions turn a painfully sincere solo into a loopy duet, which wins the contest. It's as sophomoric a plot setup as can be, direct from "Saturday Night Live." But "Matt & Ben" succeeds because both as writers and actors Ms. Kaling and Ms. Withers have a fine, deadpan sense of the absurd and the vicious. They also have full confidence in their audience's familiarity with the gossipy details of the pop celebrity culture. That the two women are playing two men is a wholly understated conceit; they simply appear onstage - in Mr. Affleck's pizza-box strewn, movie-poster adorned apartment - dressed in a style that might be called post-college presumptuous chic. But much more shrewdly discombobulating than the gender switch is that Ms. Withers, who is tall and slender like Mr. Affleck, is playing Mr. Damon. Ms. Kaling is playing Mr. Affleck but, like Mr. Damon, is both shorter and broader than her sidekick. Each of the actresses also does a short stint as someone else: Ms. Kaling, who has dark skin and dark hair, makes an entrance as Gwyneth Paltrow. And Ms. Withers does a terrific impression of J. D. Salinger, or at least a terrific impression of what you might imagine J. D. Salinger to be like. There are places in the play that ignore interior logic, a couple of scenes could be trimmed a bit - the play is 65 minutes long and should probably be 55 - and there are maybe a dozen lines that don't rise to a level of unexpected wit. But for caveats, that's really it. This is a sharp script, and it delivers its cleverness mostly without nudging you in the ribs. And in the end it's unsentimental and smart about long friendships, too; when you're not looking they tend to tiptoe right up to enmity. Finally it's both refreshing and absolutely delightful to hear insults delivered to real people - especially those people who have been wildly overpraised and overpaid - without apology. "Matt & Ben" names names, and we can be grateful to Ms. Kaling and Ms. Withers for undermining their own careers in Hollywood for our benefit. These are not the we-don't-really-mean-it caricature quips of a Hollywood roast. There's genuine venom here: "David Schwimmer is a terrible actor with one expression, and he looks like a mushroom." "Matt & Ben" has been directed by David Warren with surreptitious mischief; it's very possible he's responsible for keeping the two performers from overemoting. By now, however, he might have rethought the climactic fight scene. In it, Ben takes a swing at Matt and knocks him out, but at Friday evening's early performance, Ms. Kaling's right hook was a little too realistic. It connected and broke Ms. Withers's nose. Ms. Withers finished the show and, after going to a hospital, was back at work the next day. Can you imagine a movie star doing that?
Buzz marketing online?
Wheeling and Dealing Shopping for some new wheels? Chances are you're doing it online. According to J.D. Power & Associates 60% of consumers start the buying process by researching models, options, prices and other automotive data on the web. Sensing this huge opportunity online car seller Autobytel and Ford (F) have come up with a new marketing scheme that goes right for the competition's digital jugular. And in today's cutthroat car market, they might just be on to something. Here's how it works. Say you're interested in a Honda (HMC) Accord. You surf to Autobytel.com and click through to the Accord research page. Splashed across the top, above all that detailed Accord data, is a box labeled "Sponsored by Ford." It jeers: "The Ford Taurus has a larger engine than the Honda Accord DX." An adjacent link takes you to the Ford web site for more details on the Taurus where, the theory goes, you'll soon forget all about the Accord. Interested in a Civic? Atop Autobytel's Honda Civic research page the graphic blares: "The Ford Focus ZTW comes standard with an automatic transmission, while the 2003 Civic does not." Ouch. Point, click -- you're on the Ford Focus web page. Considering a GMC Envoy? Don't you know that "The 2003 Explorer 4X4 Limited 4.6L comes standard with a CD changer, while the Envoy does not?" You do now. After a year of development Autobytel and Ford launched the new marketing strategy (complete with its in-house proprietary technology) in January. "We see a lot of promise in it," says Ford spokesman Mark Kaline. It's easy to see why. Messages are highly targeted and highly relevant to what buyers are seeking. "It reaches consumers at the moment they're making buying decisions," claims Autobytel Advertising and Sales VP Brian Hafer. This is clearly smarter than most of today's ubiquitous, but mostly generic, online auto ads. Nor is it designed as an annoying pop-up. Built right into Autobytel's research web pages, the boxes are unobtrusive -- yet impossible to miss because they're placed right at the top of the page. All of this, Autobytel claims, has led to click-through rates of between 1% and 1.5%, or roughly double normal levels for simpler auto banner ads. And because the boxes are pre-designed there is no need for outside creative input, so that expense is eliminated. Autobytel says the spots -- which it peddles across separate product categories such as cars, light trucks, SUVs and so on -- cost $40 per 1000 impressions (Autobytel gets about 9 million visitors each month so the potential to reach eyeballs is significant). The strategy could also be huge for Autobytel. Auto companies are already the nation's largest online advertisers, spending more than $100 million last year to woo web-surfing customers. But that's merely a crumb of the total $6 billion annual auto advertising pie. Autobytel sees more of this spending flowing online -- and to smarter, more targeted methods like its own. So it's shopping the strategy to other auto companies besides Ford. "There's a lot of interest out there," Hafer claims. Lexus has already purchased spots (FYI, the Lexus GS 430 has 60 more horsepower than the 2003 Jaguar S-Type 3.0-Liter). Others seem likely to do so, too. And why not? Auto consumers want info. The web is the best and easiest place to get it -- especially if it can tell you what you want to know, when you need to know it. Nobody said marketing had to be nice.
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