Brunner Digital Blog

What do you do when the Super Bowl title is not enough? When you want more competition, more reasons to watch the game and even more reasons to talk about it the next day … and the day after …Well, if you’re an advertising agency in Pittsburgh like Brunner, you go head-to-head with an agency in Phoenix (E. B. Lane) to see who’s got the chops to survive the game and land on top. As die-hard football fans, Brunner and E.B. Lane took Super Sunday festivities to the next level by hosting a joint post-Super Bowl ad survey.

You can view my complete take on the interesting results on MediaPost and please feel free to join in with your perspective by commenting below — we’d love to hear your thoughts.

In 2008 an average of 97.5 million Americans tuned into FOX to watch the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots, making it the most-watched Super Bowl ever. The event averaged a 43.1% household rating, up from the 2007 game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears, which was watched by 93.1 million viewers and an average of 42.6% of U.S.Homes. 

MORE

Change is definitely in the air, but don’t get overzealous about transferring the mobile marketing success of Obama’s campaign on to your brand.  Here’s what I mean by that.  Did the campaign strategists for the  44^th President of the United States do a great job with their mobile marketing strategy?  Absolutely!  Who is going to argue with nearly 3 million text messages sent to an opted in audience announcing Obama’s choice for vice president?   But they also were working with a strong and growing brand – and they utilized many different channels of communication.

MORE

The world needs another “how to market in a down economy” blog post like a hole in the head.  For every person who touts the fact that “now is the best time to advertise” there is someone else writing about the virtues of shifting all efforts to measured online media, or shifting everything to the more economical social media.  In fact here’s a link to Business Week’s conglomeration of related articles - http://bx.businessweek.com/advertising-in-a-recession/blogs/.  Enough!

MORE

Brunner and a lot of other savvy Direct Marketers have always known it’s all about building and maintaining a strong customer base. And during this particularly challenging economy, it’s even more important to protect core customer relationships.

A healthy customer database sustains core revenue streams; can provide organic growth through up sell and cross sell opportunities; existing customers can easily become a new acquisition source through referrals and very importantly - intelligence gleaned from your customer segments can help you be much smarter in targeting, attracting and keeping new customers.

MORE

So you’ve developed a great TV spot for your brand. It’s entertaining, attention-getting, and delivers the message that you want people to remember about your company or product. Or maybe you’ve created a campaign of print ads, beautifully crafted to summarize your primary point of differentiation. But now what? Is that all there is?

There is an old rule of marketing that says people need to be aware before they consider, and consider before they buy. Television and print are great tools for generating awareness. But for many consumers to really consider a product today, they need the richness of information that can’t be delivered in30 seconds or in a few printed lines. Such encounters with a brand are fleeting. To really engage and begin to form a relationship with consumers – to give them the tools that they needs to consider your brand – a greater depth of information and interaction is required.

MORE

In October, I predicted that Obama’s use of the Internet and social networking would prove vital to his election; that the engagement of younger generations and the dialogue taking place online would catapult the youth vote front and center (even over the women’s vote) and offer a new way of managing a brand.  Less than 2 weeks after the election, the media’s all over it.

In the Sunday NY Times (11/9/08), David Carr wrote about Obama’s Internet strategy dating back to 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html?em.  How, at the time, the proposition of leveraging social media seemed ridiculous and unlikely. Carr goes on to write about the campaign’s success and the implications of Obama’s social network resources as he turns to governing, “The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks.

MORE

How vastly different is the election of 1808 vs. that of 2008 when it comes to communication strategy? You decide. With so much being made about how “new” tactics for getting out the vote and distributing messages for one party or another is being used today and how these “innovative strategies” for speaking to potential voters has evolved, I decided to take a very unscientific and admittedly very shallow look at how different things are.

MORE

I’ve been surprised recently to hear so many people in our industry claim the era of integrated marketing is coming to an end. They say it’s an overused term, and its meaning has become diluted. If that’s the case, then why did my Google search of “integrated marketing” just turn up 6.6 million hits? A Blog Pulse snapshot indicates the topic is hotter than ever. Clearly, integrated marketing is more than an industry buzz word. It’s actually a concept that isn’t going away any time soon, but the focus has definitely shifted. As digital media becomes ever more prevalent in our society, marketers—clients and agencies alike—are struggling more
than ever to get their arms around how to effectively integrate digital into their marketing programs. MORE

Mark Hass, CEO of Publicis’ Manning Selvage & Lee, recently stated the following in the July 28, 2008 Advertising Age article $80 Billion? Online Display Market Is Being Overhyped:

Advertising ought to be designed to support the social-media program, because the tip of the marketing spear ought to be the consumer-generated media piece. Let’s see where consumers take the product and brand, and shape advertising and the rest of the marketing opportunities around that.”

The hypothetical example he provides in the article is “how Febreze might target college students by handing out samples on move-in day. Soon it becomes a subject of conversation within a social network of that community (and if it doesn’t, a brand can suggest it become one, asking students what they’re going to do to make their rooms smell better when their parents come to town).”

While we haven’t been as bold as Mr. Hass, we too at Brunner Digital espouse to our clients that they should be engaging social-media and utilizing it to help mold their advertising campaigns. As our own Creative Director, Ernie Mosteller, wrote in his last post about effective websites, we know it is about content. Content that is compelling to consumers. Content consumers will keep and that they will share. Discover what consumers are doing with your brand on Facebook, MySpace and relevant blogs. Update your site with the brand engagement trends you see in these social-media. You already know it will be attention-grabbing because consumers are creating and sharing it on their own.

The same standard can be applied to 360° advertising campaigns. Given digital dynamic printing and digital production, your direct marketing and broadcast should be able to morph as quickly as your website.

For this to happen, advertisers need to seriously reflect about themselves and their brands. Consumers now expect more-engaging forms of content in every brand marketing communication. If social-media isn’t the tip of your marketing spear, it should at least be a plane of the blade.