Launchpad Media Watch
High Tech Firms
Turn to Print and Promos
Trojan Says Men Are Pigs
Crumpler Takes Over the Toilet
Video Game Kicks it into Gear
Canadian Club Celebrates the “Mo”
The USPS Says “Hello” to Potential Clients
High Tech Firms
Turn to Print and Promos
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If you own a television set, you are likely to have seen the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. In September, Microsoft launched a $300 million counter attack. The first series of ads starred founder Bill Gates paired with comedian Jerry Seinfeld doing of all things – shoe shopping.
These TV attacks are a bit of an anomaly. For the first six months of 2008, computer, software and Internet companies spent only a quarter of their $1.2 billion media budget on TV, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Strangely enough, as many traditional industries turn to new media, tech companies actually prefer print ads. Overall, they spent $500 million on print advertising compared to $300 million online.
“Technology companies tend to be rather traditional when it comes to advertising spend,” says tech analyst Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “As a result, they have been holding on to print strongly and keeping many related print publications alive. That may not continue to happen given the market downturn and the likely sharp cut in budgets that is likely to follow. [Overall], the technology industry underfunds marketing and is massively risk adverse, so they aren’t huge fans of TV.”
What they are fans of is promotional products. Using logoed items offline for clients at trade shows, sales calls and mailers is commonplace even though many of these brands live online. One such company is ExactTarget which provides on-demand e-mail and SMS solutions. For its “ExactTarget Connections ’08” user conference, it handed out 1,000 logoed foam hands that formed the rock-and-roll hand gesture (pointing the pinky and forefinger up like devil horns) to promote its “Subscribers Rule” initiative.
“The foam hands really drove the point home,” says Tim Kopp, chief marketing officer of ExactTarget. “During the conference, customers waved the hands wildly during keynote speeches and afterwards many customers contacted us requesting more. It serves as a great example of how promotional products can capture the imagination and influence customers.”
Sonic Foundry, a Webcasting company, took it a step further. Its select customers receive a special gift card that can be used for an online store full of logoed items like pens, mugs, shirts and water bottles. Erica St. Angel, Sonic Foundry’s vice president of marketing, says she’s perfectly happy to have her customers wear her logo. “We have an extremely loyal and evangelistic customer base. Each year we’ve increasingly received requests for more and different items, which led us to launch the online store this holiday season.”
Enderle says promotional products are popular with companies like ExactTarget, Sonic Foundry and others because they “are run by folks who are most like engineers, which means they favor things that have a clear cause and effect. Most marketing is hard to connect to an effect, with the general exception of promotional programs which do have a solid connection to product demand.”
Trojan Says Men Are Pigs
Condom manufacturer finds clever way to promote its brand
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Trojan knew it had a problem. Its intensive research
found that consumers viewed its product as sinful and dirty. Consumers were often embarrassed about using the product as there was a whole host of negative imagery swirling around the brand. The company, though, also knew that it needed to get more people to use condoms. Why? Well, to make more money…but also to battle sexually transmitted diseases (19 million Americans have one) and reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies (there are 3 million each year).
Trojan’s challenge: How do you turn a negative into a positive? It looked to its ad agency, The Kaplan Thaler Group, and within minutes they came up with a rather obvious concept: “Men are pigs. They need to evolve. Men who use condoms are more attractive and desirable.” And thus the “Evolve” campaign was born.
However, there was a huge problem. CBS and Fox refused to air the TV spot that depicted a bar full of pigs talking to women. In fact, because of various advertising restrictions regarding condoms, Trojan was having a tough time reaching its target audience altogether. So it looked to promotional products.
At colleges it regularly hands out beer glasses that have a decal of a pink pig snout on the bottom. When the beverage is imbibed the user literally looks like a pig. Rubber bracelets and T-shirts have also been handed out at spring break events, music festivals, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions as well as the Vans Warped Tour. A 40-foot tour bus hit 85 major events with the free goodies and plenty of information about safe sex.
“What we’re trying to do is personalize the ‘Evolve’ campaign,” says James Daniles, vice president of marketing for the Church & Dwight Co. “Time is currency. They need to be rewarded for their time. The reward can be viral content, the opportunity to play games or even a mug for them to drink out of. If it gets them engaged and having fun and gives them information, a promotional product is of good value.”
Crumpler Takes Over the Toilet
Bag company goes to the john for marketing effort
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Founded by two former bike couriers in 1995, Crumpler has always been an unorthodox company. The Australian maker of hip bike messenger, laptop and camera bags likes to hang unseemly names on its products including “Marry ugly” and “Cheesy disco.” Crumpler gained notoriety in the marketing world in 2006. This was the first time it ran its “Beer for bags” offer. As the name explains, consumers could swap beer for a new bag. It continued the program in 2007 as well.
 This year, however, it tried something a little different. Crumpler is distributing 100,000 rolls of branded toilet paper across the world. The toilet tissue has an eye-catching “paint-by-numbers” design. In the U.S., 3,000 rolls were placed in the bathrooms at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas during the Interbike International Bicycle Expo in September.
The show attracted an estimated 23,000 attendees. For anyone who used the restroom, the brand was hard to miss, says Natasha Prendergrast, marketing manager at Crumpler. “Well it’s a bit novel really. We had 3,000 rolls distributed in toilet stalls, in addition to decals featuring imagery from our trade show stand on the bathroom mirrors and mobiles hanging from the bathroom ceilings. We’ve already had good feedback on the toilet paper from its virgin outing at Interbike. People are finding it fun and are having a good laugh.”
More toilet takeovers are on the way, says Prendergrast, who said once her next shipment of “toilet rolls” arrives, “we will then be doing a loo roll drop into random local lavvys, store window displays and selling them online.” The effort is ongoing in Australia (where people apparently use terms like loo and lavvy in everyday conversation).
Video Game Kicks it into Gear
Campaign’s promotional product fetching nice price on eBay
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Earlier this year, select reporters, bloggers and key “influencers” received a mysterious box in the mail. In it was a single metal cog engraved with a series of letters and numerals as well as the words “Property of the Coalition of Ordered Government.”
A slip of paper said “If found, visit www.gearsofwar.com/lastday and enter the code CSID#.” An image of a skull within the cog also adorned the scrap of paper. Once at the site, viewers were told the story of the world’s end from the point of view of a robot. If the code was entered, more of the story was revealed.
This was Microsoft Games Studios’ way of introducing its new Gears of War 2 game title. One thousand metal cogs were sent out to promote the title, which was released on November 7, 2008. One blogger who worked for the postal service received a message to check a post office box in Seattle. Within it he found a beaten up old book with the cog hidden inside.
Such creativity helped fuel buzz for the burgeoning gaming franchise. “From the initial concept we knew that seeding elements into the wild would energize hardcore gamers,” says John Jakubowksi, creative director at AKQA, San Francisco, which helped create the effort.
Because of the “inherent nature of gamers, the campaign was spun off into spontaneously created blogs and communities digging deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Gears of War 2. They found that cogs are hidden all over the world,” Jakubowski says. The cogs were in such high demand, that one even sold for $265 on eBay. The original Gears of War sold 4.7 million units.
Canadian Club Celebrates the “Mo”
Moustache promo grows awareness of prostate cancer
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Yes, Canadian Club whisky was your dad’s drink, and you know what? Back in the day, your dad was cool. The Canadian whisky launched its “Damn Right Your Dad Drank It” ad campaign last year to celebrate its heritage. Ads proudly state: “Your dad wore SPF 0” and “Your dad never got a pedicure.” To support the campaign, Canadian Club created a calendar of retro-looking ads celebrating dads who had groupies (when he played in a band) and gave out nicknames (because he was the man), among other hip examples. T-shirts and coasters also support the program which is now in its second year.
The whisky brand decided to take its sense of humor and help tackle a problem many dads have today – prostate cancer. The brand declared the month of November as “Movember” (“Mo” is Australian slang for moustache). To raise awareness and money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Canadian Club is challenging consumers and Beam Global Spirits & Wine employees to grow a moustache. To support the push, Canadian Club held “Damn Right Events” throughout the month of Movember. Attendees received mustachioed drink stirrers, mirror clings and T-shirts.
“The ‘Damn Right Your Dad Drank It’ campaign is about reaching the evolved man, 25-39, who is looking for validation of his instinct that it’s okay to enjoy life and embrace his masculinity,” says Brian Stockard, brand manager of Canadian Club. “The campaign is about encouraging the evolved man to make his own memories just like his dad did.”
The USPS Says “Hello” to Potential Clients
Hello sticker takes center stage
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If I had a super power, it would be: flying; x-ray vision; mind reading; or super speed.” These were among the choices given to recipients of a direct mail piece from the United States Postal Service. The USPS wanted to let businesses know that “whether it’s purchase behavior, response history or just a zip code, you can use existing customer data to create personalized messages that are more relevant to the recipient – and more likely to be opened, read and responded to.”
This is what the mailer it sent out in October stated. The multiple choice part of the message (which also included “my guilty pleasure is…” and “my favorite way to say hello is …”) was designed to get potential customers to interact with the company in a fun and engaging way. Once they revealed their answers, they were able to receive a free T-shirt that appeared to have a series of “Hello” stickers and a free DVD about the USPS’ services. For example, the man featured in the campaign is wearing a shirt that says “Hello my name is Kal. Hello I just bought my first home. Hello I dig my greenhouse.”
The mailer also comes with a series of stickers which recipients are encouraged to slap on the backs of unsuspecting co-workers.
“The concept uses the ‘Hello my name is’ sticker as an iconic device to show our target - direct marketers, large businesses, advertising agencies and print industry professionals - that they can get much more personal than a name by using data they already have,” says a rep for the USPS.
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