… From Google to Vegemite

Australians Google any and everything. They’re glued to their Nokias, chuck a chicken on the barbie, indulge with Tim Tams and everyone has the hots for Hugh. Breast cancer has the strongest pull on their heartstrings, while Apple and Wii keep Australians constantly amused.

These are among the top brands in Australia according to the 2009 Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), a study conducted by George Patterson Y&R every three years. The latest BAV study examined 1,200 brands covering 139 different categories. More than 4,000 Australian consumers were surveyed online as part the WPP agency’s database of consumer perceptions of brands.

“What we’re seeing here are high-engagement players taking precedence over the more traditional and prestige brands. There is a new dynamic here which will have a significant impact on how marketers invest in their in their brands in the future,” said David Evans, national research director of George Patterson’s brand asset consulting division.

Top 10 Brands in Australia

1. Google
2. Nokia
3. Vegemite
4. Microsoft
5. Sony
6. Bunnings Warehouse
(the Southern Hemisphere’s largest hardware chain)
7. Ikea
8. Coca-Cola
9. Tim Tam
10. Wii

Bottom 10 Brands

1. Investra Property
2. House of Windsor Foods
3. Australand
(property developers)
4. Grazia (magazine)
5. Fidelity (investments)
6. Hudson (property)
7. GE Capital
8. Theos Bottle Shops
9. Aurora Coffee
10. GQ

“We saw the beginnings of this in the 2006 BAV study, when Google came in at No. 4. Today it is the most deserving leader of the pack right across the board due a combination of factors, delivering on promises, continuous energy and steady service innovation. Apple’s five products are also clear consumer favorites.”

This year’s BAV incorporates a new algorithm that tracks consumer trust in brands. And despite numerous recent stories to the contrary, consumers’ trust in brands has actually increased.

This is perhaps most evident in the service and finance sector, where new entrants Youi and ING have powered ahead of their conventional competitors. It also turns up in BAV’s first data on media and sports stars with all-around nice guys, Hugh Jackman and Michael Clarke, blitzing the field and adding significantly to their earning potential. Among the most-trusted brands are those consumers rely when they’re not feeling so flash: Panadol, Band Aid, Neurofen and Herron rank in the top 15.

There are also losers in Australia’s multibillion-dollar brandscape. Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) is punch drunk, while four of the top losers are clothing brands, Mambo, Stussy, Sportsgirl and Quicksilver. Several premium luxury brands have been hammered by the financial crisis with watches, jewelry and hotels slipping badly.

Consumers have also delivered a wake-up call for the car industry. BMW has fallen of its perch with Citroen and Land Rover also in decline. In other categories, NineMSN has taken a bath, while lamb has been given the chop in favor of chicken as Australians’ favorite meat to BBQ.

“Marketers can use BAV to determine their investment priorities, brand by brand and category by category. The study is also identifying new consumer trends, such as boomers being the first generation ever to follow the brand adoption patterns of a younger generation,” Mr. Evans said.

Digital Communications…

I spend a lot of time gazing into a crystal ball that I know is going to be cloudy half the time. Lately I have been pondering Facebook’s future.

Facebook is clearly on a roll and is knocking on Google’s door as the biggest site on the web. Will it continue to dominate or see its lead slip? Here are two potential outcomes.

The Google Scenario: In the more rosy picture, Facebook remains the disrupter. It transforms how we use the web.

Just as search changed our expectations that everything we want to know is accessible if we Google it, Facebook is the inverse. If information is important, it will find us through our friends and their friends and so on. We don’t have to Google it.

“Trends from friends” is as transformative as search. The more we use Facebook and the more we create and connect there, the smarter it gets in realizing what we need and when. We don’t have to ask.

The opportunity cost of switching to an alternative is simply too great. This is why millions remain with the same IM network they first tried years ago.

Facebook, like Google, groks data. And they know how to study and use it to make the experience and value grow with every status update, photo, connection and interaction. Once they get serious about search — and consumers see the value in using it for finding curated information — Facebook’s value and power could grow.

The AOL Scenario: It’s hard to believe but 10 years ago AOL was once dominant. It was a hit with advertisers.

Publishers paid for position and built grand palaces. It was the place to be. It was also a walled garden. Sound familliar? This begs the question: Could Facebook follow the same path? Possibly.

Through continuous innovation Facebook is trying not to become AOL. That’s the smart play. However, each successive update has irked consumers. The revamped news feed, which rolled out last week, is just the latest.

So far we keep coming back; but you have to wonder if a social network has nine lives. It’s possible fickle consumers will eventually migrate elsewhere.

Where might they turn? Just as with AOL they’ll go everywhere. The entire web is becoming social. Facebook Connect is a play to make this happen on their terms. However this is where Google, Yahoo and other stalwarts could shine. They already control millions of IM and email address books and have lots of data.

So which mask will Facebook don — Google’s or AOL’s? My bet right now is Google’s.
—
By Steve Rubel

… Helps Unemployed Find Jobs

Ryan Star knows a thing or two about being unemployed — but what he didn’t know was that he’d create a new model for music marketing.

The rangy rocker is working on an album release, has a reality TV show under his belt and just wrapped up about a half-year gig as the opening act for “American Idol’s” David Cook, but the memory of being without a job is still fresh. “I’ve been there, living on girlfriend’s couches,” said Mr. Star, munching on a green apple while sprawled across a chair in a living room of another sort — a lounge area in the office of his label, Atlantic Records. “I know what it is like to be down and have nothing and now I can reach out a hand to help.”

What he’s done to help is feature real unemployed professionals in the music video for his new single “Breathe,” and in the process he’s blended music marketing with recruiting. The website, breathe4jobs.com, is clearly there to sell the single, but it also acts as a very public posting board for a dozen real job-seekers, from software consultant and restaurant manager to balloon artist and digital-marketing specialist. People viewing the video who are interested in hiring them can send an e-mail through the site, which has already drawn a nibble for at least one hopeful less than a week since its posting.

“Touring around the country with David Cook, I’ve met a lot of people after shows,” Mr. Star said. “Going to Detroit, and all these cities, I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly and the sad. I’ve seen what it’s all about. These are people who want to work.”

He’s had some success — his song “Brand New Day” is the theme song for Fox’s “Lie to Me,” he’s appeared on Mark Burnett’s reality program “Rock Star: Supernova” and his album, “11:59,” is due early next year — and he decided he wanted to give back when it came time to do the video.

“The purpose is to make you look good — you are selling a product at the end of the day — but it didn’t sit right with me to spend a lot of money on something to make me look good knowing what [not having a job] means to these people. There were a million visuals I could put to it … but I wanted to find an idea that would mean something in the bigger picture,” Mr. Star said.

The lyrics to “Breathe” fit that purpose — “Breathe, just breathe, take the world off your shoulders, put it on me” — but the singer was also wary of looking crass with the finished product. “You don’t want to do something cheesy that looks like you are trying [simply] to sell something,” he said.

But so far, it’s been well-received and has generated some publicity from CNN, NBC’s local L.A. affiliate and ABC Radio, as well as a Twitter plug from none other than @aplusk, Ashton Kutcher, who spread the word to his 3.89 million (and counting) followers. “I don’t even know him,” said Mr. Star, himself an indefatigable Twitterer (@ryanstar). “It’s not like I said ‘Hey man, do me a favor,’ it’s just spreading.”

That’s good news for Trey Pitts, billed in the video as a digital-marketing specialist and retail manager. Mr. Pitts, a self-taught digital expert, is actually a friend of Mr. Star’s who helped shape his Facebook and MySpace pages. He’s been out of work for about six months after being laid off as a manager for TJX Cos. and has also worked as a racetrack manager, a video-store supervisor and sold real estate.

“Ryan’s heart is as big as his voice,” said Mr. Pitts. “This is not just some marketing strategy, he really cares about people.”

His contribution to the video has generated a couple of e-mails for more information and Mr. Pitts, whose dream job is to create digital marketing for a music or movie company, is hopeful.

So is Mr. Star, who is pumped up by the video hitting 181,000 tweets in a day and becoming a trending topic. “People underestimate the masses,” he said, tossing away his apple core. “You and I are the masses.”

Digital Advertising!

Oct. 27 marks the 15th anniversary of the industry’s first banner display ads, which appeared on Hotwired.com. To the many of you reading this who weren’t in the business back then, that’s not a typo; I’m not referring to www.HotWire.com, the travel site, but HotWired — the first commercial digital magazine on the web and the offshoot of Wired magazine.

For us, it started with a speech. It was May 1994, and Ed Artzt, the chairman of P&G at the time, made his landmark speech at the 4A’s meeting in White Sulphur Springs, WV calling for marketers and their agencies to dive headlong into the “new media” revolution or be left behind.

My boss and mentor Bob Schmetterer, president of Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (MVBMS), a unit of Euro RSCG, was in that audience and he was totally energized by Artzt’s challenge. It’s important to note that our largest account at the time was MCI, which employed Vinton Cerf — the “Father of the Internet” — as VP-data services.

At the time I was an MCI account guy and Bob assigned me to this new media and created a deadline in order to jumpstart the agency’s involvement in “cyberspace.” Our challenge seemed simple: develop something called a “graphical ad unit” for HotWired. This initial assignment was under the guise of “let’s explore this new medium and see what happens.”

HotWired was the first commercial web magazine to attract blue chip corporate sponsorships dollars on the web. The site launched shortly before Netscape’s browser, and the advent of such other new media such as Pathfinder.com (Time Inc.’s commercial web content offering) and Cnet.com.

Once the media commitment to HotWired was made, we needed to select clients we believed would share our excitement in entering this new space. We went through the client list and quickly reasoned that MCI (telecom), Volvo (automotive) and ClubMed (travel/hospitality) would be as good a core of candidates for this exploration as any.

Four of our then-clients placed ad banners as part of that first campaign, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-Collect. (The other two advertisers were AT&T and Zima.) Keep in mind, this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access? Purely dial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. The online U.S. population? Two million, if that.

These “original six” were the first brands to take a leap of faith and place advertising in the unchartered “cyberspace” territory. But several didn’t know they were taking it until after the fact. Corporate America was still largely unfamiliar with the graphical web, so we didn’t even try to sell the concept. We decided to commit agency media and development dollars to place client banner ads on HotWired without clients’ prior consent or knowledge. The way he saw it was if they liked it, they would be happy to pay us and if not, that was OK too; but at least the agency would get a running start at exploring this new exciting medium that was on course to change all of our (professional) lives.

We were given the ad specs by HotWired and it was only then that we realized banners ads were clicked on and could drive consumers to a client designation on the web. Oops! This accidental lesson sparked us to develop websites for these initial ad banner placements. Some of our clients weren’t too sure they even wanted to “interact” with this new online population. Can you imagine?!

Its launch in 1994 was not without debate internally as to whether the ad units offered to the advertiser community should be simple text links or graphical ad banner units. Graphical ad display banners won out and the rest is history. And take a look at the hilarious come-on AT&T used to generate a click-through: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will!”

The reaction ran from enthusiastic to somewhat leery. MCI, as one would expect, was truly supportive of our proactive initiative. Their corporate culture encouraged exploration. Volvo, on the other hand, understood the value of our experimenting with the new medium, but did not want to push/urge any interaction with the consumer. They didn’t know what to expect, did not know how to handle responses and was concerned legal implications were involved. As a result, you see the first Volvo ad banner was nothing more than the Volvo logo and photo of an auto. No call to action or direction to click was to be incorporated into the Volvo banner. In fact, if someone clicked on that banner in October of 1994, it would take them to a simple questionnaire that could be emailed by the consumer on what kind of Volvo they might be interested in.

Looking back at the birth of this industry and the first simple graphical banners, I am still amazed at how much has been achieved in the first 15 years. That said, I anxiously await the further advancements coming our way in terms of new ad technologies, ad forms and ad measurement capabilities (e.g. attribution modeling). The issues surrounding display banners and online brand measurement are many and have been well chronicled (see the recent special eMarketer report entitled The Online Brand Measurement: Connecting Dots for example).

Research suggests we have a long road ahead in terms of measurement — and I don’t disagree; however, I’m not convinced we’re that far off. I don’t believe there will ever be a “silver bullet” to solve all of our problems, as our industry is constantly evolving, becoming more complex and proving to be a moving target. But all that said, from what we have learned through the use of fundamental building blocks of acquired knowledge, industry and case studies, the use of traditional media metrics, the use of existing best measurement practices for digital and a quest to continually “test and learn,” we will ultimately be successful.

Has any one item in our industry been encased with so much debate — at times even disdain — as to its true value, role and contribution to marketing communications from its inception in 1994 to this day? Yet the display banner is the impetus to the creation of the online advertising category that will reach beyond $24 billion in 2009, according to eMarketer. Perhaps more important, no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.

So on Oct. 27, I hope you will join me in toasting the birthday of the banner display ad — whether you are a “cup is half-empty” or “cup is half-full” type of person. Some days I love the business and others day… well, not so much… but I have to admit: it’s been an unbelievable 15 years.

I leave you with a challenge… Can you guess the two-word copy from one of the original banner ads that generated 78% click-through rate? I look forward to your answers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / Frank D’Angelo is founder and partner of CL&S, New York.

The Candidates: Amazon, Hyundai, Lego, McDonald’s, Walmart

Each year, Ad Age awards one top marketer judged to outperform the rest. The past two years, we left the choice up to senior marketing executives, but this year, dear reader, we are turning this important decision over to you.

Ad Age’s editors and reporters have done the spadework, narrowing the list of choices to five marketers we deemed most adept at navigating what — to understate — has been a tough year. The selection will be interesting, since each of these companies handles its brand in different ways and each suggests a different way ahead for the art and science of marketing in a time of great flux. It’s up to you to tell us which you think has been most successful in 2009, worthy of joining recent Ad Age winners such as the Obama campaign (2008), Apple (2007) and Toyota (2006). Voting ends Wednesday, Oct. 21, and the victor will be announced in the Nov. 9 issue.

Amazon: Customer Service as Marketing

Far from a marketer in any traditional sense, Amazon has just about no ad budget and a tiny internal marketing operation. Instead of trying to penetrate consumer consciousness with a barrage of TV ads, it’s focused on developing a supreme customer service on a massive scale. As a result, shopping at Amazon is a seamless experience and just about everyone knows it. And that kind of awareness is gold in a day when bad products and services are outed immediately, regardless of the media budget or creative idea propping them up. Keeping prices low (though not too low, even in these hard times) and shipping deals sweet has — no surprise — resonated with recessionary customers. Revenue was up 16% over the first half of 2009 as Amazon consistently beat expectations.

While big-brand blasts aren’t its style, Amazon does do cool things that hit home with tastemakers. The retailer won plenty of plaudits for its frustration-free packaging, meant to do away with those annoying plastic clamshell containers. And, of course, its Kindle e-reader has helped build the category in the mind of consumers, something competitors Sony and Barnes & Noble are now trying to take advantage of.

In 2009, Amazon also snatched up what’s likely to go down as one of the smartest deals of the year, laying out more than $800 million to buy Zappos, which should pay huge dividends, both in terms of bolstering Amazon in the clothing and shoe sales, and in continuing to build out a culture based first and foremost on the customer.

Hyundai: Bold Assurances

What can aggressive marketing do for you during recession? Just ask Hyundai. In September the Korean auto giant enjoyed 27% sales gains while the market fell over 23%. Amid the worst auto market in decades, so far in 2009 it’s managed to expand its share by nearly a third, to around 5% of the market.

Of course, critics will say that 5% is still relatively small beans, but Hyundai is building the kind of marketing machine that has even the most cynical ad-watchers expecting further growth. This isn’t simply a story of bludgeoning consumers with a bigger media budget (although that certainly hasn’t hurt): In 2009, Hyundai has gone from advertising also-ran to trendsetter. The brave and smart Hyundai Assurance push confronted the recession head-on, telling consumers they could give their Hyundai back if they lost their jobs. And now the automaker has launched an effort aimed at those who have old cars that didn’t quite make the cut as clunkers — another wise response to market conditions.

The automaker still faces some major tests in the U.S., not least of which is launching the Equus into the luxury car market next year, a move that will test the elasticity of a brand that is probably still generally perceived as being about value. But, with a PR operation that’s done a great job of communicating the ever-improving quality of its vehicles — and the advertising smarts it has shown in 2009 — you start to believe that today’s Hyundai can pull off even those high-tariff marketing maneuvers.

Lego: Always Listening

Deep into a video-game era, Lego should have long ago seen its empire of bricks reduced to heaps of multicolored plastic rubble, and apocalypse did almost come to Legoland. In 2004, losses totaled nearly $300 million, as the family-owned Dutch company was caught between a past where children’s playtime was all about using imagination and a present of “Rock Band,” games, movies and TV shows that don’t allow for stretching the imagination. Yet, in a relatively short time Lego has bounced back. Going against the grain of a toy industry in decline, Lego saw sales spike 18% last year and, in the first half of 2009, sales were up 23%.

Success has come along multiple fronts. First, Lego slashed the amount of time it takes to develop new toys and, more importantly, the toys it already makes, to gel well with contemporary culture, linked then to popular movies such as “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.” That means Lego’s owners had to overcome a long-held resistance to creating movie-themed sets that often had violent accoutrement such as guns and knives. Now, by some estimates, licenses make up more than half of sales.

Listening might now be en vogue among Twitter and Facebook-obsessed marketers, but Lego was getting good at it before it was fashionable to court the opinion of consumers. The other thing Lego has done is to stop viewing the large population of adults who love its brand as an oddity to be ignored. Now the company has a big presence at events involving grown-up fans and has 44 ambassadors around the world who seek out the community’s input. The company is also investing in its retail presence, expanding to 47 stores by year’s end and it’s designing a board game and developing a movie.

McDonald’s: Redefining Value

In 2009, McDonald’s redefined value for the fast-food industry, teaching that it isn’t synonymous with dollar items. While McDonald’s has owned that cheapest of propositions, it’s also done a series of campaigns behind core full-price menu items, such as Big Mac and Chicken McNuggets, that resulted in double-digit sales gains each time — extra impressive at a time when consumer confidence is low. McDonald’s even ditched the dollar cheeseburger, which has lowered overall percentage of value menu sales and left competitors fighting over how many things they can sell for a buck.

In raising the price of the double cheeseburger by 20 cents, the marketers threw franchisees a bone while they were forced to shell out for the McCafé renovations. It was a masterful stroke that meant the McCafé rollout was done on time, even a little early. In recent months, it’s promoted premium products such as Angus and McCafé, the latter of which has essentially redefined the coffee category and will likely reduce the price of a decent cup of coffee in the future. In addition to helping the caffeine-addicted, McDonald’s assuaged mothers by adding salads, grilled-chicken options and vanilla lattes, and by adding a moms’ quality control panel. This winter, it’s going after 7-Eleven with more bottled drinks and then setting its sights on healthier competitors by adding smoothies next year.

In the U.S., second-quarter same-store sales grew 3.5% and global same-store sales were up 5% at a time when many of the best-performing competitors were flat and the industry as a whole was down. McDonald’s achievement is particularly dizzying because the chain is lapping many years of gains, some of them quite sizeable, and over a massive system.

Walmart: Recessionary Resource

When Vanity Fair and “60 Minutes” recently asked Americans which company best symbolizes America today, Walmart was the winner by a country mile. Of course, there aren’t too many country miles free of the sprawling superstores. But ubiquity aside, Walmart has made great strides in doing more than just a growing an elephantine footprint used to stomp out suppliers and force mom-and-pop rivals out of business: It’s become corporate America’s recessionary resource in a time when it’s most needed.

An ad campaign has driven the value message across at just the right time, when Walmart marketing has developed sophistication beyond simply low prices. It has increasingly applied analytics to maximize margin with an eye toward the fact that the retailer doesn’t have to keep expanding price gaps (in some cases it can even narrow them) to win.

Walmart has winnowed lesser-performing brands from shelves, worked to get marketers to shovel more of their marketing dollars into Bentonville’s own marketing budget, and restaged its Great Value brand. In short, it’s having a massive impact on all the marketers who do business with it — which is most of them.

Walmart has also been active on the digital front, launching a highly successful “Twilight” DVD almost entirely through social media and it is looking to expand the clout of its website, both by selling ads to vendors and bringing on new vendors to fill in gaps in the product offering. It’s also pondering ways to harness the long tail both within and outside its stores via digital marketing.

We appreciate your input. This poll closes on Wednesday, Oct. 21.
By Matthew Creamer

by Subverting Its Own Search Policies

Google is experimenting with its deepest foray into local advertising and along the way is branching out from one of its most cherished philosophies of search advertising: the keyword auction.

In a bid to get more local advertisers to buy search ads, starting this week Google is trying out a new type of search ad and pricing system in the San Francisco and San Diego markets.

Rather than ask businesses to set up a campaign and bid for keywords, they’re offering local advertisers (or non-advertisers) a search ad for a flat fee. The fee is set by Google and based on the average that similar businesses are paying for a given keyword in that market.

The goal is to simplify search advertising for local businesses that may not want to bid on keywords or to set up and optimize a search campaign.

“When we talk to small businesses, they don’t always want to know what an auction is, how to create an ad, or bid on keywords, it’s complicated, so our goal has been to, ‘How can we make this really simple for them where they just pay a flat fee per month,’” Susan Wojcicki, Google VP of product management, said.

Familiar model
It’s a model much more familiar to local businesses, such as plumbers, electricians, hair salons and restaurants, or any local business that has advertised in the yellow pages. But Google is offering an additional perk: the option to link the ad to a Google voice number so they know which calls are being referred from the search ad.

Calls that come in via the Google Voice number are identified by what Google is calling by a soft “whisper”: “This call brought to you by Google.”

The voice number allows businesses that don’t have websites — and don’t care about clicks or conversions — the ability to track the performance of their ad.

“You get the benefits of simplicity and a simple startup but also the measureability of AdWords so we tell you how many visitors you got and what value you are getting for the investment you made,” said Jeff Huber, Google senior VP of engineering.

The program has been live for two days in San Francisco and San Diego, and right now there are no immediate plans to expand it. Google isn’t first to market with this; companies such as WebVisible and Marchex have been packaging search inventory and reselling it to local businesses for some time.

Improving relevance
But those companies aren’t Google, which for many people has become the de facto yellow pages as it improves local search relevance. Google believes it could vastly expand the number of local businesses using AdWords by allowing them to easily convert an organic listing into a paid ad for a flat fee.

Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing for Clickable, said Google’s move may address the tendency of local advertises to “churn,” or start a campaign and give up on it for whatever reason. “Some businesses don’t want to do search advertising; they just want to put a dollar in and receive phone calls,” he said.

The new local ads come as Google is nearing the end of a top-to-bottom revamp of its search advertising system over the last six months known internally as AdWords 3.0. That system was first launched in 1999 and turned Google from a small startup against the likes of Inktomi and Altavista into a company that generates $25 billion in revenue, mostly from search advertising.

As part of the revamp, Google is trying to give more relevant results for local searches, which plays into its local strategy. A user who searches for a restaurant, for example, no longer has to specify where they are; that is determined by the IP address or browser, and relevant local results are returned, along with a map.

The experiment in flat-fee ads is part of Google’s Local Business Center interface, which Mr. Huber said serves “over a million” small businesses worldwide.

Universal, Sony, Others Wrestle With How Social Media Affects Box Office

Can the so-called Twitter effect boost a movie’s box-office performance faster than any traditional form of word-of-mouth? Not yet, say many top movie marketers and researchers, but the social networking platform’s impact on a studio’s media mix and campaign management has already taken shape.

Witness Sony Pictures, one of the first studios to create branded Twitter pages for its films, which saw releases such as “District 9,” “Julie & Julia” and “The Ugly Truth” open strong and maintain momentum by keeping the branded conversation around each film active and updating the films’ followers on the microblogging site with exclusive content in the following weeks. The results? Grosses of $113 million, $90 million and $88 million, respectively, and counting.

But the idea behind a Twitter effect gained traction this summer after the Hollywood press and the blogosphere blamed Twitterers for shortening the box-office life of films such as Universal’s “Bruno,” which opened to a strong $30 million but quickly sputtered to a $12 million second weekend based on poor word-of-mouth and a high volume of negative tweets. Could moviegoers with nothing but a cellphone and a Twitter account really be undermining the millions of dollars poured into a movie’s marketing?

Market research firm 360i recently tested the Twitter effect by comparing Twitter traffic for “Bruno” during its first weekend at the box office with three other summer films, and found “Bruno” to have the highest percentage of drop-off in second-day box-office grosses (-39%) and negative tweets (21%).

But making a direct correlation between the two is far from scientific and hardly one-size-fits-all for all films, said Sarah Hofstetter, 360i’s senior VP-emerging media and client strategy. “A movie like ‘Bruno’ is exceptionally polarizing — either everyone wants to see Sacha Baron Cohen naked or they don’t,” she said. “You have to differentiate in the content and context of a film — if you give too much credence to Twitter marketing and you say, ‘Our efforts contributed to a 10% lift in ticket sales,’ no one’s going to agree on what caused that.”

Little impact
And Twitter, as well as other social media, has yet to directly affect the methodology behind the metrics supplied by box-office forecasters to the studios to gauge all-important first-weekend ticket sales weeks in advance. One major movie forecaster said active Twitter and Facebook users have yet to be included in the sample size because it “needs to be reflective of how the studios spend their money. To chase Twitter or social networks would be a disservice to that population.”

In fact, Twitter has helped forecasters such as Marketcast and Nielsen NRG steadfastly hold on to their role in manufacturing hype around those all-important first three days. In the case of “Bruno,” analysts correctly predicted the $30 million opening weekend, but stayed away from managing post-debut expectations. “Our job stops after opening day. The rest is up to the universe,” said one forecaster.

Nor has Twitter had a measurable impact on studios’ marketing budgets, even as they add dedicated staffers to manage and measure social-networking activity around their slates. “While Twitter is important as social media, it is a very small sliver of our marketing campaign,” said a Sony executive. “I think it is more effective as a gauge of how effectively your materials are working and it allows marketers to take a real-time pulse on consumer attitudes towards your brand or property.”

Instead, Twitter has become the campaign-management tool of choice, one that studios and other marketers can harness faster and to a greater extent as more case studies crop up on a weekly basis. “The name of the game for the studios is to take full advantage of all early signals,” said Pete Blackshaw, exec VP-Nielsen Online’s digital strategic services. “The downside for them is a movie can be damaged really quickly — the flow of information on these platforms, and degree to which influencers are tapping into those signals is quite profound.”

But one former marketer at a major studio suggested that Sony has harnessed Twitter more effectively for a $30 million movie such as “District 9″ than other surprise blockbusters such as Warner Bros.’ “The Hangover” or Disney’s “The Proposal.”

“Sony did a very good job at continuing engagement with consumers. The film got such positive buzz from consumers that they started talking about it through [Sony's] real-time stream,” the executive said. “I don’t think those other studios knew what they had on their hands at the time.”

Partners:  kasy fiskalne

Van Heusen, JC Penney Sponsor Fan Initiative in Larger Marketing Play to Reach Men

Major pro sports halls of fame tend to be largely pristine, marketer-free shrines to their respective sports, but the Pro Football Hall of Fame is breaking with that tradition in a new multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal with Van Heusen and JC Penney.

The fashion brand and retailer are partnering with the hall on a microsite housed within JC Penney’s website that intends to give fans a voice in the debate over which players ought to be enshrined in the Canton, Ohio, museum. A voice, of course, is not the same as a vote — but the fan’s choice will be promoted extensively via the NFL Network, the league’s premium-cable-TV outlet, and could influence the selection process. The microsite for the partnership incorporates social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

“It’s like a CNN poll,” said George Veras, president of Pro Football Hall of Fame Enterprises, a recently launched unit within the hall that will pursue deals with marketers and other ventures. “You know, the president of the United States looks at polls, and they can impact the process.”

Major shift in media strategy
For Van Heusen, the deal represents a major philosophical shift in its approach to marketing. For years, the company’s ad budget has been dominated by print fashion titles. As recently as two years ago, according to Phillips-Van Heusen Chief Marketing Officer Mike Kelly, the company was spending as much as 80% of its ad budget on fashion books. This year, those books won’t even get the biggest slice of the spending pie, as he expects sports to grab more than 50% of Van Heusen’s ad outlay.

“We’d been concerned that the fashion-print model was becoming less and less effective,” said Mr. Kelly. “Our research showed that our target’s interest was sports, sports, sports, and then maybe news, and pretty much in that order.”

And an aggressive move into sports by Phillips-Van Heusen subsidiary Izod eased any remaining doubts that the sports sector ought to be a priority. Izod, like Van Heusen, had been primarily a fashion advertiser, but after seeing a positive return from major sports deals such as securing naming rights for the Meadowlands Arena and sponsoring IndyCar racing, has shifted more heavily into sports. Mr. Kelly said Izod’s success was critical, internally, in selling a more sports-centric strategy for Van Heusen as well. So, knowing that it would want a substantial retail activation component for whichever program it pursued, Van Heusen agreed to partner with JC Penney, which had also been casting about for ways to better target and engage men, on a sports initiative.

Still, Van Heusen and JC Penney do risk a potential backlash if the fan’s choice doesn’t pass muster with the pro football writers who wield the votes that count. But executives at Penney and Van Heusen said they welcomed being associated with what they hope will be a hearty debate that will expand the Hall of Fame’s reach.

The deal also calls for major retail displays within JC Penney stores, and appearances at NFL stadiums by Hall of Famers such as Dick Butkus, Lynn Swann and Gale Sayers, who will promote not only the fan voting but also, in an effort to spark debate, their own choices.

“That’s what’s great about sports,” said Bill Getner, VP-men’s marketing at J.C. Penney. “There’s going to be that debate.”

Blanketing sports media
The arguing certainly won’t lack for exposure. All told, The Van Heusen Pro Football Hall of Fame Fan’s Choice campaign will be featured in ads running a variety of media including broadcast such as “ESPN Monday Night Football,” NFL Network, ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike” program; print such as The New York Times; an 80-by-60-foot Times Square billboard at 42nd and Broadway; and on the web including ESPN.com, NFL.com, Yahoo.com, AskMen.com, Brash.com and Facebook. The NFL Network will also air four specials devoted to the Hall of Fame.

The companies became aware of the opportunity with the Hall of Fame’s new enterprises unit because the president of Van Heusen’s licensing division, Kenneth Wyse, was a friend and high-school classmate of the Hall of Fame’s Mr. Veras, who let him know about the company’s interest in new sports deals.

“That’s how it happened,” chuckled Mr. Veras.

And while this is the first major sponsorship deal for the Hall of Fame, Mr. Veras made it clear he does not expect it to be the last. The Hall is currently looking at finding sponsors for its enshrinement week and for a Hall of Fame events platform.

P&G, Cine Las Americas, Comcast and Their Hispanic Agencies Lapiz, Latinworks and Grupo Gallegos Are the Biggest Winners, With Deep but Entertaining Insights Into Latino Culture

The best Hispanic advertising this year cleverly mined cultural insights into Latinos in the U.S. without resorting to stereotypes. In one of the judges’ favorite campaigns entered in Advertising Age’s Hispanic Creative Advertising Awards, Comcast’s CableLatino and Grupo Gallegos entertainingly demonstrated that if you don’t watch TV in your own language, you lose too much of the story. To drive that point home, English-language newscasts were devised with crucial information, like the photograph of an escaped killer or product shots of poisoned food brands, hidden by subtitles.

“It’s all about insights into the Spanish-speaking viewer,” says Peter Intermaggio, Comcast’s senior VP-marketing communications, and one of the four courageous clients who partner with their Hispanic shops on award-winning work (CableLatino won two Golds and a Silver prize). “An essential truth of the Hispanic market is that the viewing experience can be very frustrating, obscured by language difficulties and poor translation. The creative captured that experience.”

Other insights were crafted into the two Best of Show winners. From LatinWorks for Cine Las Americas: Latin American reality is so surreal, imagine how good the movies must be. And from Lapiz for Procter & Gamble’s Pepto-Bismol: Don’t let the food you love hurt you.

This year’s winners understand the value of marketing to Hispanics, whether it’s the NFL working with Vidal Partnership to court 28 million Hispanic football fans, or the California Milk Processor Board, a dairy supplier in a state where “10 out of 10 new households created will be Hispanic,” said John Gallegos, principal at Grupo Gallegos. New advertisers are still entering the market, including Starbucks, with its first Spanish-language print and radio ads from Lopez Negrete Communications.

Expanding audience
Hispanic agencies are also taking a leadership role in marketing to the fast-growing bilingual and English-speaking Hispanic market, a desirable demographic that general market agencies are eager to poach.

CreativeOnDemand, for instance, does English as well as Spanish-language versions of its Volkswagen of America campaigns, and some of the work, such as this year’s Routan launch, a Silver and Bronze prize winner, enters the general market rotation.

But the bicultural Hispanic isn’t easy to reach.

“The consumer is living two lives,” said Carlos Boughton, brand director of Tecate Equity. “It’s more like American culture viewed through Mexican glasses.”

With Tecate Light, a Gold and Silver winner, the Mexican beer is targeting U.S.-born Mexican-Americans and immigrants.

But the U.S.-born Hispanic exists across a very broad spectrum, from someone who speaks Spanish every day, spends time in Mexico and marries a Latina, to a guy who didn’t grow up exposed to Mexican culture at all, Mr. Boughton said.

More with less
Media targeted at bilingual and English-speaking Hispanics tries to bridge that spectrum. MTV Networks’ U.S. Hispanic channel MTV Tr3s, for instance, won a Gold with a crash course on how to “Speak Tr3s.”

Like agencies everywhere, Hispanic shops are doing more with less. One of the best creative pairings in the Hispanic market, Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi’s Latino shop Conill, came up with several low-budget but attention-grabbing ideas, such as a first-ever Hispanic test for the Prius using an online effort called the “Pixelometro” to measure fuel economy. And radio campaign “Ruidos” (“Noises”) featured traffic and news reports and music interrupted by ominous grinding sounds and the message “If you thought that was your car, you should buy a Toyota certified used vehicle.”

One of this year’s most innovative efforts was the way Conill linked T-Mobile USA with soccer in “Dirige su Equipo” (“Direct Your Team”). The agency started with the premise that soccer fans think they know best, and invited fans to text advice to a player during a game. The message appears to the TV viewer to be shouted at the player on the field in real time.

Hispanic agencies are moving into branded entertainment, a new category at this year’s awards. Both winners delve deeply into Mexican culture. Conill produced a mini-documentary that aired on Discovery en Espanol about the rodeo-like charro, where the standard equipment includes horses, cowboys and a Toyota Tundra. And Alma DDB and Fire Advertainment created a State Farm-backed band, Los Felinos, that has taken on new life in a reality show that made its debut on Telemundo this month.

Ad Age conducted the 11th annual Hispanic Creative Advertising Awards in partnership with the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies.

JetBlue will land its first jet at Los Angeles International Airport today and has packed the plane with YouTube celebrities to document the ride.

In a bid to build buzz for its new routes from New York’s JFK and Boston’s Logan International to LAX, the airline is counting on a stream of tweets and videos produced by Howcast and YouTube stars such as Kevin Nalts, Delphine Dijon, Justine Ezarik and Meghan Asha. To facilitate that, JetBlue is using its one plane with wireless internet access, BetaBlue, for the JFK-to-LAX flight.

None of the bloggers is being paid directly by JetBlue, but all got a free flight, and some are being paid by Howcast to produce how-to videos featuring JetBlue. The airline asked all the bloggers to disclose the relationship in whatever videos they produce and to keep them “family-friendly.”

“We wanted it to be transparent; we’re not trying to hide JetBlue, we just wanted them to have the space to do it in their own voice and make it interesting,” said Rachel Viega, account supervisor at MediaCom Interaction, a unit of WPP, which oversees JetBlue’s digital marketing.

JetBlue opted for a low-budget, slightly experimental media plan around the flights. The company bought outdoor and radio spots in Los Angeles to promote the new routes, as well as print ads in AMNewYork. But the airline is counting on the cast of video bloggers on the plane to seed YouTube and the Twittersphere with reports from BetaBlue.

JetBlue contracted with Howcast to produce a number of how-to videos related to air travel, including “How to Fly Coast to Coast” and “Happy Jetting with Delphine,” which will be distributed on Howcast’s network and YouTube. Howcast CEO Jason Liebman said all the videos have a “shout out” to JetBlue that discloses the connection.

JetBlue started flights into LAX on Wednesday, its third airport in the Los Angeles area; it already flies to Long Beach and Burbank. After some PR disasters last year and new competition on Los Angeles routes from Virgin America, the airline emerged with a savvy, recession-themed marketing campaign.

It has also made a habit of listening to its customers via Twitter. Its feed @JetBlue, managed by PR rep Morgan Johnston, has more than 680,000 followers. Recent tweet: “on BetaBlue with some fun folks at 28,000 feet and climbing for our JFK-LAX launch.”