EIDSON & PARTNERS

Unique Media Placement

I do the Wall Street Journal crossword every weekend and was surprised this week to see the puzzle embedded in an ad.

It's an ad for Lincoln Financial Group and the headline, in a handwriting font, reads "The third letter for 77 across is a t. Your futureself." The body copy starts "When it comes to the right financial plan, who knows what you need better than yourself."

I thought this was great media placement and concept. It made me stop and read the ad, the copy paid off the puzzle tie-in nicely with the futureself reference, it had a call to action, and the company name will be right in front of me the entire time I spend on the puzzle. I'd say those were creative and media dollars well spent.

Simple, Elegant Products: Part 3

Two months ago, I signed up with Jott.com, a free voice-to-email, voice-to-text messages, and voice-to-reminder service. Now, I'm totally hooked on sending emails and text messages while I drive.

As a new Jott.com user, you register your phone number, names and email addresses for contacts that you want to Jott.

With Jott's toll-free number in your cellphone speed dial, you are ready. (Total set up time: less than five minutes.)

Just call and answer the voice prompt, "who do you want to Jott?"

Name a contact or say "myself", and leave a voice message.

In less than five minutes, the voice message is transcribed and delivered as an email or text message. Plus, your original voice message is attached as an audio file -- just in case the transcription misses a nuance.

It's quick, easy and free.

It is truly a simple, elegant product that solves that universal problem of how to jot a quick note when there's no other good option.

In addition, you can access Jott feeds. By answering the prompt, "who do you want to Jott" with "Jott Feeds", you can select pre-loaded feed options or custom feeds -- for example "news" retrieves Yahoo News headlines, "business week" retrieves Business Week headlines. Similarly, Lifehacker, Mashable, Tech Crunch and Yahoo Weather are retrieved and read flawlessly.

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Cause Washing

I've been hearing more and more about "green washing" -- the concept of touting your product/service/company as being environmentally friendly without really putting resources toward the effort. I think the same applies to much of the cause marketing we see today.

Tom Fishburne hits the nail on the head with his post "The Cause Marketing Bandwagon" that has a wonderful formula in the cartoon regarding why the company loves causes. He makes the point with the example of a smoothie company that quietly and effectively supported a cause that was a perfect fit with their brand.

We get into trouble when we base philanthropic decisions on marketing instead of core company beliefs.

What is the worst (or shall we say best?) example of insincere cause marketing you have seen?

Rising Fuel Costs & Pricing Strategies

May 28th: Dow Chemical announced a price increase of all of its products by up to 20%.

"Our first quarter feedstock and energy bill leapt by a staggering 42% year over year and that trajectory has continued, with the cost of oil and natural gas climbing ever higher,"noted Dow Chairman and CEO, Andrew N. Liveris.

Not to be outdone, the City Council in Holly Springs, GA added a surcharge to speeding tickets. Police Chief Ball defended the decision by saying, "I was hearing that Delta (Air Lines), pizza deliveries and florists were adding fuel charges to their services, so why not police departments?" The $12 surcharge is expected to generate $19,500 to $26,000 annually to help cover fuel costs.

How fast are you pricing up to cover your operating cost increases?

 

Rising Food Costs & What It Means

The Grocery Manufacturing Association (GMA) just released a major new study of food inflation.

Bottom Line -- Expect food prices to rise 41% from 2008 through 2012. Meat, milk and eggs, which have high commodity input costs, will escalate 79-86%.

The study reports that these increases are based on growing worldwide grain demand that emerged in 2002 and remained the major driver until 2006. At that point, U.S. ethanol production became a driver.

This new study is based on a projected five-year corn price of $5.25/bushel, which is already out of date. July corn futures closed above $7.40/bushel yesterday.

You can't escape the sense that continually escalating food prices will be the new norm for years to come.

The Rise of the Rest, Fareed Zakaria's column in the May 12, 2008 Newsweek, provides stunning support for the idea that global commodity food prices are on a relentless upward track.

There are a few clues as to how US consumers are reacting to the food cost increases. For example, WalMart reportedly saw a shift in the way Christmas gift cards were redeemed in the first quarter. Redemptions shifted toward groceries versus other categories.

All of this leads to some fundamental questions for every marketer:

1. Does your current marketing plan anticipate this type of inflation? Your five year plan?

2. What will be the combined impact of rampant food, fuel, health care inflation on customers? What are the new spending trade offs?

3. What does this mean for young families? For fixed income families? What does this mean for your best customers?

Use TrackBacks and let us know what you think.

 

Less is More

I went to a seminar this week on getting new business. The speaker made several interesting points regarding presentation slides. Here's a short recap...

- Most presentation slides have too much stuff on them. He called the typical tiers of bullets "son of bullet" and "grandson of bullet." His advice is to never have bullet grandchildren.

- If everything you say in your presentation is on the slides, then the listeners may assume that you're not so smart. Anyone can read a slide. But, if you just have a few words on a slide and then you can expound on the topic, then you look smart. And, the beauty of it is that if your presentation time gets cut short, you can easily shorten the amount of time per slide just by providing less detail in your voiceover per slide. You can't do this as easily if every slide has a long slew of copy on it.

- There should be just one key takeaway per slide. Get in, make your point, and get out. Next slide.

I thought this was good advice. It reminded me of a Business Week article earlier this year called "Deliver a Presentation Like Steve Jobs." The article recommends creating visual slides. It said, " Inspiring presenters are short on bullet points and big on graphics."

Behind the Curtain

I really liked Tom Fishburne's cartoon he posted last week titled Wizard of Ad with the balloon copy "Pay no attention to the company behind the curtain, just watch our ad." Tom writes "Someone in the group was talking about company transparency, and how reluctant many companies are to reveal their inner workings.  The traditional approach is to concoct a persona via advertising and point to that instead.Yet, more and more consumers seem to be looking for the company behind the curtain.  They're no longer as swayed by the concocted brand image of advertising.  Instead, they want to know who's behind the products they buy."

This really rings true. So often company's use their advertising to express their desired persona instead of what they are. Consumers aren't fooled by this. An ad sets up expectations and if those expectations aren't met when the consumer interacts with your company, then I think it is worse than if you hadn't advertised at all. The reason it's called a  "brand promise" is because you are making a  promise to your customers. I think my Mom was right, "Don't make promises you can't keep."