Traffic Jam in Super Bowl

When Americans tune into the Super Bowl on Feb. 6, they should expect to see as much metal as they do pigskin. Car marketers, having woken from their recession-induced ad slumber, are doubling down for Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas and setting the bar sky high for auto companies and their ad agencies to craft commercials unique enough to break through the clutter and capture viewers' attention. At least eight different auto manufacturers have purchased airtime. What's more, many of them are buying more ad time than they have in the past, and raising the ante with two or three commercials sprinkled throughout the broadcast.

Ad Age reports that BMW North America will return to the game after a decade, seeking to use the Super Bowl as a stage to launch a new slate of cars. General Motors, which had sat the past two games out, is back in with a focus on Chevrolet. Chrysler, the only U.S. automaker to show up in the last Super Bowl broadcast with a single ad for Dodge, is back in and this time wants at least two brands in the game. Audi of America is making its fourth consecutive Super Bowl appearance and will be in the game's first commercial break.

Indeed, many automakers are bouncing back, posting healthy sales results after bankruptcy filings, government bailouts and recalls, and like Mercedes, they have news to share about new models -- in BMW and GM's case, electric car models. It all adds up to car makers heftily contributing to the record sellout of the game. News Corp.'s Fox, which is broadcasting the game, booked 80% of its ad inventory by June, and by October the network announced the Super Bowl was sold out.

Now comes the real challenge: After spending all that money, how do you get your messages to cut through? Since so many car ads look the same, the chance of their being recalled by consumers is low. Most top broadcast-network shows have a car ad in nearly every commercial break, often showing an automobile or truck traveling on an open road or city street while pop music plays in the background.

Making things worse, car makers over the past two years have grown more conservative, trading humor and emotion for retail-oriented messages. Steve Wilhite, who spent 20 years at VW of America and was the client behind Arnold's famous "Drivers Wanted" campaign, describes car advertising these days as "absolute dreck," "mind-numbing" and "uninspiring." Experts say carmakers will now have to work doubly hard to avoid familiar tropes or themes.

To combat the problem, ad-buying agencies representing many top automakers usually ask TV networks not to run ads from competitors during the same commercial break. Even so, these rules only apply to national commercials, and ads from local stations can sometimes run in the same ad pod. Ad buyers with knowledge of automobile marketing have often said that consumers' ability to recall individual car ads gets weakened as more of them air.

One big car advertiser hopes to stand apart from the pack by not joining it. Ford Motor Co. will advertise only during Fox's pre-game coverage, said Matthew VanDyke, director of U.S. marketing communications at Ford.

Hey, Taco Bell, Where’s the Beef?

Last week a law firm claimed that Taco Bell is using false advertising when it refers to using “seasoned ground beef” or “seasoned beef” in its products. According to the law suit, the meat mixture sold by Taco Bell restaurants contains binders and extenders and allegedly does not meet the minimum requirements set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be labeled as “beef.”
Attorney Dee Miles said they had Taco Bell’s “meat mixture” tested and found it contained less that 35 percent beef. The lawsuit does not seek monetary damages, but asks the court to order Taco Bell to be honest in its advertising. Irvine, Calif.-based Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch said the company denies that its advertising is misleading. “Taco Bell prides itself on serving high quality Mexican inspired food with great value. We’re happy that the millions of customers we serve every week agree,” Poetsch said. He said the company would “vigorously defend the suit.”
Jon Andersen with the Andersen Law Firm wrote an article about advertising law. Here’s what Jon wrote:
In a recent reported matter before the Nation Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus was an objection to some press releases released by the company, PrintsMadeEasy, Inc. Among other things, the press releases announced that the Business Cards Association of America had given its “annual” award for “Top Business Card Provider” to PrintsMadeEasy.com.
The award was issued by a “blue ribbon panel” that ranks business card providers on their service. The release then went on in some detail about the reasons PrintsMadeEasy.com was selected for the award (as well as a few disparaging remarks about competitor VistaPrint).
As you have probably already guessed, there is no “Business Cards Association of America”! There was absolutely no truth to the claim that any award was issued by such an association, let alone an “annual” award, nor was there a “blue ribbon panel” which ranked business card providers on their service.
Squirming in the face of the enormous falsehoods, PrintsMadeEasy tried to duck by saying that the press releases were really not advertising and furthermore, they (PrintsMadeEasy) did not control the content of the press releases which were prepared and distributed by an outside public relations firm.
Needless to say, NAD wasn’t buying any of that bit of guff and determined that the press release was nothing short of a paid commercial message by the advertiser. No joke! Advertising practices such as this should be hammered, and hammered hard. Here both the company and the PR firm were completely dishonest and deserve any suffering that may have resulted from this activity.
Probably no business is more competitive than food. From white tablecloth restaurants to supermarkets to farmer’s markets, the variety of offerings is mind boggling. So, making a product stand out is no easy task. In the recent past, the move on the part of the large consumer packaged food marketers, the thrust of the pitch seems to have been to involve health benefits.
For a while, the products seemed to focus on their “lack” of bad ingredients, i.e. no fat, low sodium, reduced sugar, etc. If we eat the advertised product, we will reduce our risk of the adverse health effect associated with the product in an unaltered state. And the advertising followed suit, with headline claims on how to lower your cholesterol by simply using the advertised product and, oh by the way, also following a low fat diet. And so it went.
Now, the trend has shifted from what is removed from the product to what has been added for our benefit. It is a world of additives, the “vitamin enriched” products, such as orange juice and even water. And vitamins everyone thought they understood. There is even a chart on most products detailing your daily recommended vitamin level, and the percent of that level a serving of the product delivers.
Then Dannon struck gold with its Activia yogurt. And a new advertising theme was created, “biotics.” Probiotics! Prebiotics! And the theme now is how these ingredients, work with your body’s natural systems (digestive, immune, etc.) to provide health benefits greater than ever.
Of course, advertising, spreading the word on these new ingredients and the health benefits jumps in with both feet, citing clinical studies, test results, statistics and other supportive “scientific” evidence. Many of the claims border on the claims made for products that most reasonable consumers know are not true, the “lose 30 pounds in two weeks with X-Loss” sort of thing. But these are “big-league” companies. So the question is real benefits or just marketing hype? How do we tell?
Ah, a California (where else) law firm is seeking to have a jury tell us. Representing a female named Patricia Wiener (and seeking to have the case expanded to a class action, mostly because there is not much money to be made in one plaintiff), a lawsuit has been filed against Dannon alleging that Ms. Weiner has been damaged because of the deceptive advertising for its DanActive, which duped her into buying the product. The law firm takes great issue with Dannon’s claims of “clinically proven” results. Lesson: Is your claims substantiation evidence court-worthy?

Why Social Media Practices Are Like Football

You’re not likely at the point yet where you have social media wired into everything. Right now, you may just be trying to figure out where to get started and deciding who is responsible for managing it and accounting for the results that grow from it. That’s perfectly okay, and it’s where a lot of organizations begin, say Jay Baer and Amber Naslund, social media strategists.
As social media adoption expands in an organization, however, you need a model that’s scalable and provides some autonomy within other functions and units but that maintains some central coordination for the purposes of consistency and clear communication. For that, let’s look to the football field for inspiration.
The Coaching Staff
The coaches are an organized, recognized group that acts as the hub for all things social media within a company. It can be small, with just a few people, or larger, with broad representation from a number of areas. If there’s already a dedicated social media team in your company, they often form the core of this group and are deeply active participants and advisors.
Coaches are responsible for making things happen in their own areas of the business, such as customer service, marketing, or product management. Each department might have one or two coaches who are represented as part of the larger group. Coaches take knowledge and consensus from the group regarding overall social media strategy and apply this information to the day-to-day functions of their team. They also bring back challenges, information, and successes to share with the other members of the coaching staff so that everyone can learn from one another.
They might work on:
Leadership: Championing social media strategies to management and throughout the organization to encourage participation
Intent: Laying out the underlying tenets and purposes for social media participation as an organization
Guidance: Developing social media participation guidelines – not just rules and regulations – that everyone can adopt and get behind
Best Practices: Be the center for subject matter expertise around the world of social media
Coordination: Keeping of the messy bits of internal communication and coordination around social media implementation
The Players
The players are the social media in action throughout the organization. Although the coaching staff is the center for overall social media approach, each coach works with his players to develop goals, strategy, and success metrics for their area of the business. The players are made up of the front line listening and response teams that actively mine social media for information and they are the ones who act on what they find.
Information gatherers form your centralized listening centers, monitoring the social web and mining it for relevant information, and they make sure that information gets to the people that need it. They might interact on behalf of the company as well, but their chief responsibility is to locate information for others to act. These players are early warning systems, researchers, and the information filters of corporate social media.
Frontline responders will be the faces of your company. They are the ones who work in a public light to either react to the needs and demands of your online community or provide a public-facing persona and presence for your brand. They conduct the proactive engagement and participation online to connect with customers, prospects, and the community as a whole. Social media and community management professionals are frontline responders, as are your communication teams and your customer service teams.
The Booth
Everyone in your company is affected by the speed and scale of social media, even if some corners are affected in a nonpublic way. These are the members of the booth—social media stakeholders whose participation may not be daily but is no less important.
Your writers and creative types might be part of the booth and build communication strategy. Human resources can focus social media efforts externally for employee recruitment or internally for talent retention. Research and development and product management capture insights from customers or the competition. Legal and compliance can focus on managing risk while adapting to an environment with less control. Analysts can derive actionable insights from data and feed those back to teams, and even IT can evolve their operations to support more fluid internal communication networks.
What ties all of these people together is the unifying work of the coaching staff. Departments take the strategic cues from the coaches and apply them downstream to their teams. They build independent, autonomous strategies that integrate with the larger whole, providing a networked but nimble approach to social coordination that can work for any company of any size.
The increasing speed of business calls for a distribution of decision making and authority throughout an organization to make us quicker, more nimble, and more responsive to the demands of immediacy. We need teams that communicate faster, with more fluidity and less friction. And to do that, we simply have to shatter the bottlenecks of process and control that have historically created a sense of security and consistency.
It’s time to organize our people and communications in a way that allows the elephant to dance much lighter on its feet.