Cheers for Cheerios

From time to time an advertiser does something in an ad that grabs an undue amount of attention. Sometimes it is positive attention.  More often it is negative.

Recently, General Mills ran a Cheerios ad designed to promote the heart healthy properties of the cereal. You can watch the ad here.  Because they chose to make the family in the ad a mixed race family, it has drawn some attention and criticism that has nothing to do with the message of the commercial.  

To their credit, General Mills did not pull the commercial, although they were forced to take down comments about the commercial on YouTube because of the nature and intensity of some of the negative comments.

Typically, this type of thing gets me depressed.  But there is a video put out by Benny and Rafi Fine that changed that.  The video, found at the bottom of this post, shows the reaction of several young children, aged 6 to 13, to the commercial and to the controversy surrounding it.  The video below will gave me hope in the up and coming generation.  The video below made me realize that the people who brought down comments for an ad on YouTube are the immature ones.  The video below helped me realize that so many of the social/political issues we have been struggling with for decades will no longer be an issue once this generation, and the nation, grows up!

Mostly, the video below will make me realize just how smart Cheerios was to keep the ad up and running!

Bad, Fast Emails

One of the primary wonders of the internet is the speed with which it can disseminate information.  Information, unfiltered and unadulterated, can speed around the world at the speed of a tweet.

This is powerful and wonderful and awe inspiring when it works to share word about a political movement, a scientific discovery or the birth of a prince.

But, when someone makes a mistake on your email address in a distribution list, it can speed around the world almost as fast as word of the latest celebrity arrest.  It can take longer to get things worked out than the endless stories about the celebrity's paroles and rearrests.

Similarly, if a mistake is made in a newsfeed or newspaper, that mistake will be picked up and circle the globe a couple of times before you burn your tongue on your morning coffee.

Now, more than ever, accuracy is important.  It is so easy to fix errors in a document, factual accuracy might not seem that important.  It is not primary document accuracy that is so important but what I like to call the echo document accuracy.   Errors carried by echo documents have the greater impact.  Echo documents are all the reposts and retweets that a primary document creates.  Once echo documents start bouncing around, it is very difficult to contain them.

Now, more than ever, it is important to contain and correct mistakes as quickly as possible.  Nothing is as fast as a bad email!

Ready, Shoot, Aim

In this era of Twitter and Instagram, there is considerable pressure on companies and brands to be timely and topical and try to grab their share of the viral madness of a given issue.  In this era of citizen journalists and a smart phone in many pockets, companies and brands are compelled to try to be the first out of the gate with a comment about a topic.  It is a Ready, Shoot, Aim culture.

The truth is, however, many companies end up doing much more harm then good to their brands  when they display their clumsiness or cultural insensitivity through a poorly written or ill-timed tweet or post.  The chances of this happening go up exponentially when a company is focusing more on timeliness (we want to be the first to comment on this) than appropriateness.

Occasionally a company hits a home run.  Ironically, a perfect example of a company hitting a home run is the tweet that Oreo sent during last year's Super Bowl.  When the power went out and most of us were growing weary of listening to the announcers try to fill an unexpected long period of time, the marketing team for Oreo was working hard and effectively.  They came up with a simple, brilliant, topical tweet.  You can see that tweet here and at the end of this blog.  It was funny.  It was inoffensive.  It filled the time while millions of people were waiting for the Super Bowl to start again.  It got retweeted over and over again.  It went viral.  Opportunities like the Super Bowl power outage are rare. Companies being ready to take advantage of those rare opportunities are even rarer.  Oreo was the company that took the best advantage of that opportunity.  They are still enjoying the benefits, as people like me continue to talk about it and share the tweet.

But it is not easy to do this.  Many companies, trying to be quick-witted or topical or edgy, end up sounding tone deaf, insensitive and just plain nasty.  Take for example, the ads for Blush Lingerie connecting their underwear to Edward Snowden uncovering things.  You can find these slightly NSFW ads here.  The ads are not that funny and somewhat tone deaf.

It also seems as if some marketers can't resist joining in on a world event that is garnering lots of attention.  For example, consider the tweet by Kennith Cole, a clothing designer of some renown, who tweeted ""Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KC"  His next tweet, 2 hours later, was an apology about making light of a "serious situation."

Every marketer dreams of doing what Oreo did in the Super Bowl.  To a marketer, it is like hitting a walk off home run in the World Series.  But (as I totally overuse this sports analogy) every home run hitter says you strike out a lot before you hit a home run.  The trick is to make sure your strike outs don't do serious damage to your brand.  The trick is to make sure your misses are simply misses and not culturally or socially insensitive to the point of being all people remember about your brand.  The trick is to tie your brand to an event that is easier to make jokes about, like the Super Bowl, rather than one in which people are killed and maimed, like Arab Spring or the Boston bombing.

Finally, and I think most important, it is more important when using social media to tie your brand to current events to take a bit of extra time to get your message right.  No one is talking about who had the first advertising tweet tied to the Super Bowl power outage.  Rather, they are talking about the brand who got everything right.  The brand who took the time to aim before they shot!

An Organization of Note...and HBD to Me

From time to time in my blog I like to highlight organizations that are worthy of a bit of attention.  These will be organizations that help to embody some of the marketing and communications concepts I often write about.  They are organizations that, whether by design or happy accident, are sharing their short, simple message in a clear and effective way.  Put another way, they are organizations that are working.

One group that seems to do a good job of that is the International Crane Foundation.  The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and their wetland habitats.  One of the things that makes ICF unique is the depth of completeness of their particular focus.  The mission statement is: "The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to conserve cranes and the ecosystems, watersheds and flyways on which they depend.  ICF is dedicated to providing experience, knowledge, and inspiration to involve people in resolving threats to these ecosystems."

Simply put, ICF does anything and everything it can to preserve the 15 species of cranes worldwide.  This means working to save and protect their habitat.  Developing and supporting breeding programs.  Educating students and adults about the beauty of cranes and threats to their survival.

One of the ways ICF's unique focus manifests itself is through their 225-acre Baraboo, Wisconsin main campus.   At Baraboo, among other things, they maintain a captive flock of approximately 100 cranes on   This flock includes the only complete collection of all 15 crane species anywhere in the world.  I took the photos in this blog at ICF's headquarters.

When ICF sends out emails, they are full of news and links to things like the Crane Cam where you can watch nesting pairs when they have eggs in their nest.

The International Crane Foundation has a simple focus which leads to a lot of not so simple work.  If you are interested in finding out more about cranes and ICF's work to save and preserve them, you can find them at www.savingcranes.org.  

I hope you find the organization as impressive as I do!

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Birthday Cake
(Photo credit: Will Clayton)

Today, July 24th, I celebrate the successful completion of another trip around the sun.  I would love to share a slice of cake with all of you, but am afraid you'll have to settle for a byte...(sorry...I couldn't help myself!)

Also, in lieu of the presents and cards I know you were in the process of sending, I would like to ask a small favor.  If you enjoy reading this blog, please consider subscribing by email.  The link to do so is at the top of the column on the right.  If you do, I will try to return the favor by occasionally writing something interesting, informative or mildly humorous.  I won't send you money Thank you!

A Numbers Game

It is very easy to feel overwhelmed by the quantity of data that is increasingly available to organizational and marketing leaders.  It is very easy to find yourself wanting to retreat to a analytic fetal position and ignore the data.

But the reality is that we value what we measure. Similarly, we should measure what we value.  There is a nuance between those statements.

The very act of collecting data on something, imparts value on it.  When my wife and I bought a new hybrid car 10 years ago, one of the things that we were fascinated by was the dashboard graphic that showed us our gas mileage at that instant.  We quickly learned how different ways of driving impacted that all important MPG number.  Our fuel efficiency was important to us in concept prior to that, which is why we bought a hybrid.  But with the graphic in front of us it became much less of an ethereal concept and much more of a focus every time we got behind the wheel.

Similarly, a long time ago, when I worked in an advertising agency, we collected the column inches of newspaper articles that appeared about our clients.  Because we were collecting that data and sharing it internally, it was a frequent topic of conversation.  Eventually, we recognized that as an advertising agency, not a PR firm, we really didn't impact our client's newspaper mentions.  We realized that we were collecting newspaper mentions "because we could," not because it was important.  We discontinued it and the topic of column inches was never discussed again.

With so much of our marketing and communication lives happening online, data collection is no longer the issues it once was. There are metrics galore available to any marketer or communicator who wants them.  The challenge for marketers has shifted from trying to figure out what information to gather to trying to figure out what, of the plentiful data available, is useful data.

Whereas before, marketers measured "what they could," now to a greater extent they can analyze what they should.  It seems to me that easily available data still has that allure of importance.  Like with column inches at the ad agency I worked for, marketers need to be careful about chasing after measures such as Facebook likes or Klout scores simply because they are available.

Just as social media options should be a tool in your marketing toolbox, not your marketing strategy, available metrics should help you measure whats important, not a measure of what is important.

Volunteers as Starting Points

Abraham Lincoln said that if he could get someone to lend him a book, they would be a friend for life.  The act of lending something as valuable as a book was an act of engagement and trust.  After that, it was impossible to be indifferent and indifference is a bigger threat to friendship than animosity.

The same thing is true about volunteerism.  If you can get someone to voluntarily do something in support of your organization or brand, even something small, you have the start of engagement.  Once you have engagement, you have awareness and involvement and all sorts of good things can happen.

I suspect that this is the thinking behinds the marketing campaigns that are abundant right now that encourage readers or viewers to "like" or "retweet" or "pin" the latest page, site, or post of the company.

The trouble is that often the marketing plans don't go beyond the request for the original interaction.  Lincoln didn't change enemies into friends simply by borrowing books.  He used that initial act as an excuse to engage in conversation, debate an issue or lend back a related book.

Similarly, just getting someone to like your Facebook page does little to no true marketing good.  Getting someone who had liked your Facebook page to them sign up for an e-newsletter or to request a coupon for a free sample of what you are selling is a step in the right direction.  The point is it is easier to get people who have taken a tiny bit of time to like you on Facebook to take a tiny bit more time to sign up for something or watch a video. The general public who haven't volunteered their tiny bit of time, haven't made that tiny commitment to you.

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A Strong, Simple Message

One of the most effective strategies for cutting through the message clutter is to have consistency of message.  Convincing non-marketing leaders of the need for consistency of message can be one of the hardest things to do as a marketer.

To be effective your message must be clear, concise and repeated frequently. In a mass media strategy, that means replaying the same ad on the same media over and over and over again. In a new media strategy, while message repetition has a place, message consistency becomes more important. Your message will be displayed differently and probably less frequently on different media. Done well, it could be MANY different media.  So if someone sees your message on a banner ad, a magazine ad, a retweet, in a radio story and on your blog, there had better be the same message elements running through each of those, or you have lost out on a golden opportunity to drive home your key message.

One of the scariest things about social media for most marketers is loss of control of the message.  The conversation of social media is much more difficult to manage than the monologues of mass media.  One of the exciting things about social media for most marketers is that you can interact and engage customers and potential customers directly.

There are some things you can do to help make sure your message is heard:

• Select a strong, simple message and use it consistently and constantly in everything you do.  
• Make sure your message is heard and understood and used by all internal audiences because internal audiences carry your message out into social media.  Make sure they are carrying the message you want them to!
• Make sure your strong, simple message is translated effectively into tweets and posts and blogs, so that wherever and however a prospect or customer is interacting with you, she is getting that same strong, simple message.  This can mean changes in length of message, language of message and format of message.  It should not mean a change of the core theme of the message.
• Use that strong, simple message over and over and over again.  About the time you are getting so sick and tired of that strong, simple message that you can't stand seeing it anymore is about the time that your audiences are starting to notice it.  Continue to use it.  Fight with your boss and your bosses boss when they insist on a new message.  They will be glad that you did in the long run!
• Resist the urge to complicate things with additional messages, sub messages, tangential messages or anything like that.  Companies that have been most successful in marketing and messaging in both traditional AND social media have presented a strong, simple message and stuck with it.
• Make sure your message means something to the audiences that matter to you.  If your strong, simple message is in jargon or uses terminology that is unknown or unfamiliar to your audiences, it is NOT a strong, simple message to that audience.
• I do want to be clear.  A strong, simple message is not necessarily a simplistic message.  "Acme Industries is good" does not qualify as a strong message.  Your message should identify your organization.  It should emphasize or highlight some reason prospective customers should consider becoming customers. This means it should emphasize or highlight a solution to a problem commonly shared by prospects.

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