Best of Marketing

Do not leave your garbage on the Bus

Very nice vehicle wrap execution from Grey in Amsterdam.

What can be done to enhance Superball TV effectiveness with online?

Brands that leverage the symbiotic relationship between their offline and online investments increase consumer engagement and reap higher returns than those that don’t. With the growth of social media, avenues for online conversations have increased exponentially—and brands that plan ahead to anticipate the conversations, engage the audience and create community are priming the pump to maximize their ROI.

If you plan timely, you can add an online component to your TV presence:

Do you pre-seed the ad copy?
Do we create an online community?

Do you prime search engines? 

All these things will demand foresight, agency cooperation, internal stakeholder cooperation and the like.

Better people management

In every management book you read that people are the most important components to success, however not enough practical advise is given. Things you can implement tomorrow. Here are a few practical things you can do to create employee engagement:

1. Manage with a personal touch
Provide public personal recognition, write "great job" and "thank you" emails

2. Make the ambition clear and understood
If you have a clearly formulated ambition, continue with communication where the company is heading, what this means for your department and how this translate to the subdepartments. Keep this direction simple and clear and ensure it combines the hard numbers with the projects and products that will deliver it, what it requires from the people and how it will effect cost and top line.

3. Set expectations
Be clear and direct what you expect people to do. Ensure that your managers meet regularly (monthly) with their teams to update them on what has happened in the last month.

4. Seek out different opinions
Visit customers, invite people for lunch with whom you have never had lunch, go to dinner and connect with your people

5. Create Bonding
People can only deliver their best when they are emotionally connected to the business and their leader. Be personal, know them

6. Create opportunities
Have a clear career path in place with due dates for next moves, criterias to distinguish between high and poor performers, and be actively involved in peoples careers

How do you manage feedback to the creative team

I have been trained by promotion agencies, media agencies, advertising agencies. I have done role plays on how to provide balanced feedback and not piss the creatives off so that they are still motivated to make the changes you want them to, prepared fake briefs to see on what part the creatives focus on and how words can be misinterpreted, I have gone through agency reviews and all that stuff. But one of the challenges remains how to respond to a creative proposal. Here is a humoristic take:

You gotta love the different disciplines of marketing

This one is a classical joke I have heard a few times, but now it is illustrated:

Cyber Shopping in U.K., France and Germany Active as Christmas Approaches

You often see reports of online shopping doing well in the USA. But the European shopping is equally healthy. Read the following report from Mediapost:

ComScore Networks recently released the first in a series of European holiday season shopping analyses, which revealed that French retail sites have experienced the largest gains in the first three weeks of the season (versus the pre-holiday shopping period from 28 August - 29 October), capped off by a 79-percent gain in cyber shopping traffic during the most recent week (ending 26 November) versus the pre-holiday average.Retail sites in the U.K. saw a 65-percent increase, and German sites experienced a 63-percent rise in the most recent week compared to pre-holiday levels. Amazon and Apple Computer, consistently appear in each country's list of top sites, demonstrating the global appeal of these two brands.

Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe, said "While cyber shopping visits rose most quickly in Germany during the first week of the holiday shopping season, online shoppers in France have since become more active."

How to create a climate of success for your marketing team?

When your marketing department feels good about coming to work, they perform better. When they are disengaged, energy drops, quality suffers, communication is compromised, and good people start looking to leave the organization. These feelings are costly -- both in lower impact in the market, lost faith from the organisation and lower creativity.

To illustrate this challenge, let's look at two fictional employees on their way to work:

Jack is looking forward to doing his best work; he's engaged and excited. Partly because he's “just a positive guy,” and partly because he's part of a great team - his boss listens, the work seems to matter and respected, the agency responds well to his demands and the organisation gets it that his programs are really connecting with the consumer.

Cindy is dreading another day in the office. She's experienced, skilled, and a good worker, but there's something about this organization that rubs her the wrong way. She doesn't think her boss cares, the management team is not interested in marketing but just want the sales and budgets gets cut all the time.

How will they each perform today? How will they affect others? And what do they each need to remain productive and engaged?

All too often, the management team and partly the marketing VP become isolated from their teams - they don't have close relationships with the people two or three layers down. This gap can easily become a source of distrust and organizational dysfunction that impinges on the department's ability to provide superior services.

Employees frequently say they don't know their management team. Leaders tell us they feel disconnected from the front line. Unfortunately, this isolation is usually accompanied by a loss of trust and performance. All too often the people at the top of the organization receive “filtered” information - when more than anyone else, executives need the real story.

Leaders need to hear the “voice of the people,” not a biased perception filtered through layers of management. And they need to hear it on a regular basis.

My recipe for success is simple but hard to implement: Listen to people, identify their needs, commit to meet the needs, and then deliver. At the same time as tactical needs are being met, attention to the underlying emotional needs is key. Employees who care about their jobs and their clients have good ideas, they are committed, they want to be part of the team, and they want you to hear them.

So find out what your team wants and then make sure you deliver on them. Here are a few examples of common gripes that you should address:

1) I don't have access to the sales information or the montly reports that go around to the select few

2) I wasn't aware that brand B was doing something similare as us at the same time

3) I was asked to interview somebody, but then nobody really took my opinion into account when hiring the person or I did not have the opportunity to provide my debrief

4) The workload is getting out of control and nobody seems to care

5) The MT meets every month but we only get a censored debrief

6) Decisions are being made without the input from us. The real details are not known just the brushed up situation

7) HR doesn't really understand what I am doing, yet they control my financial renumeration. I feel there is little relationship between my performance and my renumeration except for the bonus on total results.

Simple things to event management

There are 4 simple things you need to first get right for the event:
1) People resource management
Often events are underresourced from within the company. There is usually enough people on the agency side but too few resources on the supplier side. The cause is simple: the marketing department is not build for peak moments. If you have a dedicated event team with a few flexible people than this is not so bad, but if not than you will find yourself stretching to deliver that smooth VIP experience.

2) Budget management

Underfunding is again often the case. Of course events need to be efficient but the costs are expensive and often underestimated. Make sure you have visibility of the total budget: the central budget + the local field budget

3) Make it as big as possible

Going at it alone may be great from delivering a unique brand experience, but teaming up with a company from another category can often bring the event to the next level. They can bring people, entertainment and other goodies that make the combination so much better.

4) Execution is everything

How to ensure that the execution is flawless. Very easy: weakly event management meetings or conference calls, a detailed event playbook that is centrally managed as the master and is the blueprint for everyone to execute against, experience of past events and well advanced planning. All simple and obvious but not so easy in real life.

How to manage the behavioral competences in the marketing function?

People management in the marketing department

Brand manager, research managers and marketing service managers require a different management style than sales management.
First there is the bond that the brand manager has to create with his agency people, both the account side as well as the creative side. You can help a brand manager to better evaluate creative proposals, improve the clarity of the brief and accelerate the in-field-delivery but how do you improve the personal style so that the creative team is more motivated, the sales guys respond quicker and cross category partnerships get fostered more naturally?

With regards to the research manager, other skills come into play: empathie to consumers, ability to turn the numbers into actionable insights & making the +100 page debrief digestable for the sales guys

Playboy ad European style

Agency: Rempen & Partner, Dusseldorf. Won a Cresta award in 2002

This is a comment from the creative guy on how they came up with the idea:  The art director had the idea on a rainy day when he saw a malboro poster on his way to the agency. This poster was totally wet and he saw the previous poster under the malboro ad. so that was the idea - we had two pictures of a model, one naked, one with a t-shirt. first we glued the naked poster secondly we glued the t-shirt poster on the wall. well, and then men should pray for rain…
Technically they could print out the first billboard, then the second layer could be printed with the second visual but on thinner less water resistant paper. so when it rains the top layer of the paper becomes seethrough showing the ad underneath.

Cool anti smoking OOH creative

Adhesives on poles in São Paulo, Brazil for the National Day of fighting against smoking (August 29th).

Agency: Full Jazz, Brazil

Food manufacturies are under pressure to be more responsible

Over the past 20 years, the rates of obesity have doubled in kids and tripled in teens. The poor diet choice causing this trend has put food marketeers under pressure.

Food manufacturers in recent years have proven adept at inventing new marketing claims for products that appear healthier while maintaining the status quo in nutritional values. A common tactic is to find a single health attribute such as vitamin content and market it heavily as a consumer benefit while making little change to the product.

It's a common tactic and evident in companies' emphasis on promoting potentially good features while masking problems. If you look at Coco-Pops, it promotes vitamins and minerals while ignoring the high sugar content and lack of fibre.

Appetizing billboard

This is a nice, engaging billboard for the chocolate lovers among us:

Great wear on marketing from FEDEX

This is a really great t-shirt with the optical illusion that he is actually carrying a package from FedEx.

Next wave of in-game advertising

In-game advertising has been on the increase for a number of years. Straightforward BRANDING in the form of (static) billboards alongside virtual race tracks, or soccer fields, is now commonplace. Now, with the arrival of networks like Massive billboards are becoming dynamic, mirroring electronic billboards that can be updated any time. Brands that have already used them include Nike, Honda, Cingular Wireless, Axe, Dunkin' Donuts, Reebok, Pizza Hut. Massive's advertisers include Coca-Cola, Comcast, Honda, NBC, Nokia, Panasonic, T-Mobile, Verizon DSL, Warner Bros., XM Radio, Sci-Fi Channel, Panasonic and the U.S. Navy. And the next wave may well be dynamic mobile in-game advertising: IGA Worldwide and Exit Games recently announced a partnership to enable the world's first mobile (as in phones, handhelds, PDAs) in-game advertising solution.

But dynamic billboards are just that: billboards. The real BRANDING action is in 'virtual product placement': truly integrating your brand into the story line, and getting gamers to use your products and services. Hey, if you do it well, you may even delight gamers instead of pissing them of.

Great example of a Field Billboard

Swiss Air has launched a new visibility campaign next to the airport. The campaign was created by Artfield, a company shaping agricultural land into art but also advertising. Using fields between 50.000 and 100.000 square meters the company can create characters of up to 100meters length while only using natural colors and elements.

I can't guess how much paperwork this one required to get approved.

How to use marketing for start-ups?

What is the role of marketing when you have 1 million in funding for your start-up? Well of course you need to spend money on your product developement, people hiring, selling, general admin costs and marketing.

My recommendation is to go at it in phases and remember the following guideline:

- There is nothing that destroys your product quicker than great marketing before your product is finished. The initial goal of marketing is to create trial. Your product experience should be such that it generates repeat purchase or usage. That means that if you market too soon, you get the trial but the usage will be disappointing and not generate the repeat you need.

- Once you have a product with potential repeat usage, go first after non paid media, namely public relationship. When you are new you have a lot of things to say that might be interested for the general public. Make use of this. Hire a PR agency and let them help you. They will help you build a pr-plan, develop the press materials, organize a press tour, select and deliver targeted messages to the right media people.

- I think if your funding is below 1 million, you should stay with efficient marketing forms. So next to Pr you can consider word-of-mouth marketing, internet marketing or just focusing on sales efforts. What do you think?

How to improve your online banner campaign

1. Get to the point:
Consumers think: "I don't have time to wait for the name of the advertiser to pop up. I'm busy doing other things."

In other words, don’t beat around the bush.
You have about three seconds to catch a viewer's interest, so don't attempt subtlety. The brand should be the first thing a person sees.
In this area, static ads have an advantage over animation because they are not oriented in time. They "tell the story" right up front.
In animated ads, those that display the brand in the first frame and keep it in view have the greatest chance of establishing clear brand association.
Here are 3 tactics to get to the point:

   A. Images must be powerful and "pop"

With static ads, the eye must have a compelling focal point. Even in "frenetic" ads (such as in the computer gaming industry) where images abound, one image must dominate.

   B. Follow the flow

With car ads, viewers tend to look at the middle of the car, then to the front of the car. If the car is facing to the right, then copy will be seen better if it’s on the right. If the car faces the left, copy on that side is more visible.

In both static and animated ads, the eye should be drawn toward the important information.

   C. Follow the flow

With car ads, viewers tend to look at the middle of the car, then to the front of the car. If the car is facing to the right, then copy will be seen better if it’s on the right. If the car faces the left, copy on that side is more visible.

In both static and animated ads, the eye should be drawn toward the important information.

2. Ads communicate on rational *and* emotional levels

The rational part of a viewer notices benefits. But, “if you grab someone's heart, that's where breakthroughs in advertising come." It’s one of the most difficult things to do.

The best ads combine reason and emotion.

3. Advertisers must leverage the unique strengths of each ad format

--Skyscrapers work well "if you have pleasing vertical motion" or something that builds up.
--MPUs do well with video because they're shaped like a television screen. They also work with "a big beautiful picture.”
--Leaderboards work well for text (as long as there's not too much of it) because we read from left to right.

Smoking bans are killing an important promotion vehicle for tabacco companies

As early as the 1980’s the tobacco industry began targeting its marketing efforts at bars and
nightclubs. These efforts have included promotions such as free giveaways of tobacco products
and paraphernalia, tobacco product surveys, activities to build mailing lists for future marketing
efforts, games with tobacco products as prizes, and even performances by dancers and other
individuals dressed in tobacco paraphernalia.
According to internal documents, tobacco industry marketing executives have moved toward
promoting cigarettes and other tobacco products at bars and nightclubs for a variety of reasons.
Tobacco marketing is thought by the tobacco industry to be more socially acceptable in bars
where minors are kept out by law. That is, bars represent one of the few available adult-only
venues where the tobacco industry can advertise and promote their products freely while
avoiding potential public criticism that these marketing efforts spill over into an underage
market. In fact, the high concentration of young adults (21-34) enables tobacco companies to
more effectively market their products to that key demographic group and attract lifelong
customers. It is not surprising that one of the main reasons for smoking uptake among
adolescents is social influence, especially peer smoking and peer approval of smoking.
Tobacco industry sponsored bar nights efforts are very effective in marketing tobacco to young
adults. In a study conducted by the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at UC San Diego,
researchers found that about 20% of all young adults and about 30% of those at risk for future
smoking (including current smokers) were exposed to tobacco advertising and promotions in
bars and clubs. These California results may be conservative, but none-the-less indicate that
the group potentially influenced in sizable.
Of those who attended bars and clubs at least sometimes, 41.7% reported seeing cigarette
advertisements on the walls or furniture, 36.5% reported seeing them on napkins, coasters, or
tobacco industry promotional items, and 15.4% saw tobacco company representatives handing
out free cigarette samples. Overall, 57.9% of bar and club attendees reported observing at least
one of these advertising and promotional practices. Compared to non-smokers not at risk, nonsmokers
at risk and smokers showed higher reported rates of seeing advertising on walls or
furniture or on items such as napkins and coasters. Having a tobacco promotional items or being
willing to use one was also related to bar and club attendance.
The link between smoking and drinking is quite clearly established; about three quarters of
young adult smokers in this study reported that they enjoyed smoking while drinking. Drinking
might reduce a never smoker’s inhibitions about trying a cigarette, a former smoker’s resolve to
remain a non-smoker, or a social smoker’s intent to smoke only a cigarette or two in the
evening. Also, research suggests that people perceive an added effect from smoking if they
consume alcohol at the same time.
So with the above effectiveness, introductions of smoke bans will become more widespread as California, New York, Dublin and Spain have all executed smoke bans in bars, nightclubs and restaurants.

What will the next marketing vehicle be for the tabacco industry while the anti-smoking campaigns are getting more clever?

Case studies where a local approach succeeded above a centralized approach

Coca Cola and Thumps Up in India

In the 1990s Coke's HQ in the US had worked out a strategy to reenter the Indian market, having officially withdrawn in the 60s after refusal to dilute their equity. Their strategic approach was simple but ineffective: Just buy the Indian Cola brand leader “Thums Up” with a market share of 60 per cent for $100 million only, replace the local concentrate and brand name by “Coca-Cola”, centralize the highly decentralized bottling plants and wait for nice profits. Coke completely neglected that the Indians loved not only their customary brand name but also the slightly different taste of their wonderful “Thums Up: I want my thunder”. The Indian consumers rejected Coca-Cola. As a result Pepsi Cola benefitted from increased sales and managed to raise its market share.
The whole aftermath of reintroducing the popular brand “Thums Up” by means of a huge TV and advertising campaigns, and re-optimizing the bottling plant network in India cost Coca-Cola a total sum of $ 800 million. After this Hindustani reincarnation, “Thums Up” turned out to be the most powerful brand of Coca-Cola in South Asia.

Nestlé S.A. is the world's largest most diversified and decentralized food company. Only 2.0 per cent of its sales turnover is made in its home country. For many decades Nestlé has been adapting the tastes and the composition of its products to requirements of local consumers. If you travel around the world and drink Nescafé in different countries, you will taste the difference. Nestlé also adapts its brand name to suit local expectations:
The popular brand name in Europe of “Nescafé Gold” was changed in the US into “Taster's Choice” and was successful. Also Nestlé never impose their brand on acquired companies; why should they? Since decades Nestlé always maintained and cultivated good brand names of firms they had acquired such as Maggi, Buitoni and San Pellegrino.

The Nokia Group in March 2004 launched the Nokia 1100 “Made for India”, an entry level product specially designed for the Indian market. It has several features that were incorporated, based on extensive consumer research conducted in India: It has a built-in torch light that is useful, given the uncertain power supply situation in India. It has a dust resistant keypad, adapted to certain environmental conditions in India, as well as an anti-slip grip that is designed for hot and humid weather. The Nokia 1100 is compact, reliable, easy to use, and suitable to everyday lifestyle in India, giving it an edge over its rival products. Surprisingly the Nokia 1100 was not the least expensive phone in the Nokia range. It was even priced at a significant premium over entry level phones of the competition. However, it quickly became by far the best selling phone in the country and Nokia gained five market share points within nine months. At the same time Nokia's brand preference shot up from 66 per cent to 77 per cent, refuting the myth that India is a “price sensitive” market and reinforcing Nokia's belief that the Indian consumer is a “value conscious” buyer. Localization of Nokia's products to create value in the Indian market has long been a cornerstone of their strategy.

Concept testing for new product development has significant benefits via online research

Concept testing allows you to take some of the risk out of new product development by assessing consumer reactions to a fundamental idea or design at its early stage. The objective is to identify which new ideas have the most potential and are worthy of further development.

The Objective is to forecast the likely sales take-off in year one, to estimate the repeat purchasing levels and to clarify the profile of potential users.

Concept testing and product testing are particularly suited to the online medium because a wide variety of visual and audio stimuli can be displayed and evaluated. By using images and sound files to provide a ‘near-real-world’ test environment, online testing provides you with actionable information about how your concept is perceived by your target audience, and how it compares with others on the market. Even at the pre-concept level, online testing enables large numbers of potential concept ideas to be prioritised and reduced to a manageable number that can be taken to the next step in development and research.
Benefits of concept testing online    
* Cost effectiveness - No need for expensive, physical prototype construction or fieldwork costs.    
* Reduced development cycle - Allows you to bring your product to market sooner.    
* Interactivity - Respondents can interact with high quality images or logos if required.    
* Speed of turnaround - Questionnaire can be distributed and results collected in real-time.    
* Richness of responses - Results show that people tend to be more honest and responses are ‘richer’ in content when completed online.    
* Reduced bias - There is no interviewer bias online.    
* Respondent convenience - Respondents can complete the questionnaire when and where it suits them. They can suspend the interview and come back to it later. This has a positive impact on response rates.    
* Geographical reach - For nation-wide and multi-country research, respondents can be located anywhere.    
* Automated questionnaire delivery - Exact skip and flow control and accurate rotations when multiple concepts are being shown.    
* Time and click-based interaction data - Respondent’s behaviour and level of interaction with each of the concepts can be monitored.    
* Online reporting - real-time results can be provided via our online Snapshot software, allowing percentages and simple cross-tabs to be produced whilst the study is ‘in field’.    
* Verbatim responses - Responses to open-ended questions can be provided directly to the client.    
* Evaluation control - Respondents view concepts from a consistent position and in the required order.    
* Flexibility - Variations on a concept can be tested without incurring significant costs.

Who says that sex doesn't sell anymore

These are some quite explicit sexual ads. Some say that they are innocent and that it is your dirty mind... Obviously the male brand manager had a bit of fun with these ones. Not sure how much volume it would sell but the talk or the viral value might be high.

Mercedes introduces its new S500. And it has eight airbags...

Digital product integration is enabling post shooting insertion

The new trend is all about digital product integration,    
where a marketer's products can suddenly appear in scenes of TV shows after they've been   
shot. Currently, advertisers including Chevrolet and Dannon yogurt are using the new       
technology, which is expected to grow in popularity as marketers continue to seek new ways 
to reach consumers who routinely record programming and then skip through commercials      
during playback. While traditional product integration can be obvious and sometimes         
heavy-handed, the digital technique strives to be more subtle by making the product         
relevant to a storyline, sneaking a brand name or ad message in while people are watching   
their favorite show. For instance, when Kellogg wanted to get its products into a TV show, 
Marathon Ventures, a marketing firm that specializes in digital product integration, found 
a scene in which stars of "Yes, Dear" were drinking wine and eating cheese and fruit, and   
inserted a highly visible box of its Club crackers on the coffee table. "Digital brand      
integration is part of the evolution of product placement. It's simply another tool         
marketers use to get products integrated into shows," said Marathon founder and president   
David Brenner. "If you can put it in a package, we can put it in a show."

What is the best: Centralized marketing or Decentralized marketing?

Centralization or Decentralization is often the question when companies are expanding their geographical scope and coverage. Often the company starts with a local approach as this covers the few markets best, but once more and more international markets are added certain scale advantage will start to appear. The mistake often made is lumping everything under marketing. The level of benefit will depend on what part of the marketing function we talk about and the level of scale benefits that can be achieved.

One of the elements that can be implemented early on is the area of Creating insights and best practices. This is often claimed but not really well executed. It takes time for the local teams to write up all the learnings (including the local insights and also what did not work well) and it is an interference with their day-to-day job. On the the other hand, the person at central finds it often not that rewarding as their job consists of chasing local teams and collecting and structuring the learnings. Of course this can be organized via award programs, incentives, learning web-communities etc,....

Next is the area of creating consistency for multi-country brands. This area is usually well developed by setting up an international brand team that guards the brands strategy. Local compliance needs to be achieved by giving the global team enough authority to challenge the local teams. Formal structures will usually be in place to facilitate the working relationship between the centralized brand team and the local brand teams.

With regards to setting the marketing budget, it is often that the local opco has full P&L responsability but requires central approval of the budget. It could also be that central optimizes the allocation of budgets across markets to funnel funds to the highest growth markets. For this to work smoothly roles of countries need to clearly agreed upon so that the different teams understand the cross-country allocation better.

Packaging can introduce aroma to enhance the experience

Product packaging is emerging as the new frontier in marketing as companies are developing new techniques that appeal to all five senses. And while marketers are experimenting with a variety of new techniques, packaging that emanates specific aromas seem to be taking the lead in the constant battle for consumers' attention. Companies are incorporating scents into plastic bags and bottles so a shopper can smell shampoo or chocolate without opening the top. Newly developed scented ink allows ads and catalogues to capture a consumer's attention with an unsuspecting whiff. "Consumers have to be given a good reason to buy a product," said Chris Lyons, publisher of Package Design Magazine. "Certainly, knowing or having a sense of what it smells like can help that." One of the companies at the forefront of this new trend is AriZona Beverage Co., which is currently testing a way to embed an appealing aroma inside a bottle cap to improve the taste of its beverages and the drinker's experience.

Use the web to find out about your consumers

These days you can use the web to peek into your target group. There are many services that can be used to get a real view on what consumer think.

How to get higher e-mail open rates?

Here are 7 factors that drive e-mail open rates. Let me know what you think or if you want to add some of your own experiences.

 

Timing of Sending:

•Optimal follow-up after timing of consumer opening up

•Optimal link to best on-line purchase day (Monday or Cyber Monday)

Newness of receiver to e-mail

•New names are far more likely to open the e-mails for the first 30 days. Therefore use a special welcome series for the first 60 days that delivers a message relevant for that segment of your list.

Spam filter success

•Filters look at a lot of elements to determine of you are spam. Some examples: quality of html programming, words in subject line and urls for your links in your hotmessages. Therefore it is critical to test your subject line and try to motivate receivers to unblock image blocking. Ensure you have a “trouble viewing” link

Subject line:

•Try to limit to about 45 characters. The sender line should clearly identify your company and brand so it won't have to be repeated in the subject line.

•42.9 percent open based on subject line

Offer

• 25 percent open for discounts

•20.9 percent are motivated by free shipping

Pane view Screening

•22.9 percent open based on preview window contents

Familiarity with content

•More than 60 percent of consumers opened e-mail from senders they knew and trusted. Even more impressive, 47.7 percent actually looked for the e-mails that they liked in the past.

Do not accept for mature brands to just grow above category trends!

When you work on a mature brand in a mature category, it is of course difficult to get above category trend performance but is this an enough benchmark. I think that that growth in mature categories is indeed possible, but you need to overcome the mindset that beating ‘average’ is good enough.

 

New thin moving POS

POS is getting thinner and more dynamic thanks to new production techniques. Have a look at this Bacardi poster. Click on the poster to see the effect:

Local TV is an efficient vehicle for product placement

Morning television shows produced by local TV station have become a gold mine for 
marketers seeking a place to promote their brands via product placement and 
program integration. Opportunities still abound on the local shows, unlike at 
prime-time andnational levels, where marketers are finding it difficult to secure 
available space due todemand. Those other platforms are also more expensive than 
local TV, where producers arehungry for free content. 
Appearances on local shows often come in the form of four-minute lifestyle segments 
dedicated to one brand that feature a brand's spokesperson chatting with the show's host
 and delivering the product's message to viewers. Third-party endorsements may also 
appear, as well as follow-up information about a product on a station'sWeb site. 
The marketer controls how its brand will be presented, who the spokesperson will be, 
signage, scripting and what the segments will look like.