The Mall vs. Muslims

In my last post, I alerted you all to the @america cultural center that recently opened in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The placement of an American “cultural center” in a shopping mall in a largely Muslim country seems ironic to me, to say the least.  It does, however, provide a great opportunity for us to think not only about the nature of the American culture generally, but also the nature of the conflict the American culture has with Islam (and vice versa).

The modern day shopping “mall” is not only an American cultural invention, but also our cultural icon.   A completely manufactured environment; perfection packaged for your consumption.  From the air we breath (ripe with Cinnabon), the temperature control, the relaxing muzak, to the indoor flora - the Mall provides us with the opportunity to live the good life, or at least buy some of the outer trappings to make our lives look good.

[Opinion Alert - Unqualified Opinion Follows]

What a better metaphor for the American culture than a shopping mall?  Our culture is about consumption, consumerism, expressing ourselves and exerting our freedom through our choice of brands. (Which seems counterintuitive to me, in terms of freedom, but who am I to judge - I am just a humble brandDR)

[Return to Objectivity] [Kind of]

I seem to remember a flurry of articles and news coverage around 9/11 that tried to answer the most pressing question of the day – “Why do they hate us?” 

The answer first was – they hate our freedom.  And, freedom isn’t free, so we have to fight them to protect our freedom and impose freedom on them.  Done and done.

But, they still hate us.  Hmmm…  perhaps our first answer was wrong.  They don’t hate our freedom, they hate our policies.  Ah, gotcha.  So our policy of imposing freedom through force, and our policy of imposing our cultural beliefs on them through a "cultural center" might be what’s bugging them.  

Here's my illustration of the situation:

I think my diagnosis is most in line with Bill Mahrer, who may have gotten closest to the “right” answer – “they hate us because we don’t know why they hate us.”

This clear lack of understanding of the Muslim culture, to me, is the big problem.  Through understanding comes appreciation, and tolerance of differences.  Why must we go “teach” Muslims about us, when we can just as easily “teach” ourselves about Muslims?  Home is where the heart is, not the hate is.  Let’s take care of that…

Brand America - Coming to a Mall Near You!

No matter how you feel about the ubiquitous "mall" - one thing is sure, life is better amidst the sweet smell of Cinnabon.  


The United States is hoping the sweet smell rubs off on it, as it opens its first American Cultural Center in Jakarta, Indonesia.  In its' essence and objective, the cultural center, dubbed @america, is a classic public diplomacy effort to improve the image of the United States abroad.

Public Diplomacy, by my definition, is the place where public relations and international relations intersect.  It is a bit about marketing and a bit about government/public policy.  It is all about control and influence.

By the looks of it, the center is a kind of creepy planetarium:

Adding splashy technology - like the multi monitor Google Earth project, called Liquid Galaxy, and a full stock of iPads for playing around and exploration - seems to do little to smooth over more underlying tensions between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

According to the NY Times, vistors

[were] not swayed by what [they] assumed was the motivation behind the invitation to [their] school.

“I believe that America hates Muslims, and I’m a Muslim,” [said one student]. “I still believe that after coming here.”

Given this response, one would think the $5 million for start-up and the ongoing $3 million yearly operational budget could be better spent - perhaps here in the U.S. - on programs to educate Americans about Islam and the Muslim culture.  How can we expect to cure hate abroad, when we have hate right here at home?

[If you need evidence of the hate, just recall the supposed "Ground Zero Mosque" debate that raged not that long ago.]

Oscars v. Superbowl - Advertising Smackdown, Pt. 2

In my last post we saw that in terms of nickels and dimes, the Superbowl proved to be a better value for advertisers.  But what about the return for those nickels, dimes?  Which media was more effective? 

I love posing questions that I can't really answer, but still find value in pondering.  Determining effectiveness is kind of like figuring out why we are fat.  Is it the pint of Ben & Jerry's or the bag of Doritos, or the soda we washed it down with?  Or, that we take the elevator, even when we are going down just one or two floors? There are just too many factors to consider, and it is a difficult task to isolate the actual drivers of effectiveness in any given market scenario.

So, lets look at a few things we may be able to draw some definitive knowledge from... Let's start with "recall," a term used to refer to the memorability of an ad, or the degree to which audiences remember our ad.  Recall is one piece to the much larger concept of effectiveness.

Super Bowl ads, as usual, took a humorous approach - with about 80% of the Most-Recalled ads using humor to communicate with audiences:

Oscar ads used humor too, but to a slightly lesser degree.  About 60% of the Most-Recalled ads used humor.

So - humor is a driver of recall.  Maybe, maybe not.  The American Cancer Society ad on the Oscars

and the NFL's "Best Fans Ever" spot on the Super Bowl

both scored high on recall, without hitting our funny bone with a rubber mallet.

Let's use the numbers we have to both clarify and muddy the water in terms of effectiveness.  

First, the recall scores are MUCH HIGHER on Oscar ads than on Super Bowl ads.  Looking at all 20 ads as a whole, Oscar ads would steal the top five spots overall in terms of recall while Super Bowl ads steal the bottom five spots overall.

This still leaves unanswered questions about why we see differences in recall between the two "events." Specifically, the Best Buy ad - which outperformed any Super Bowl ad in terms of recall, BUT ONLY on the Oscars, NOT on the Super Bowl.  The Hyundai ad ('old technology') also ran during both events and scored in the top 10 for Oscar ads, but not for the Super Bowl.  

Perhaps the answer lies in frequency?  The Super Bowl views primed our minds, and then the Oscar airing triggered our memories? Or does the answer lie elsewhere?

Advertising Smackdown - Oscars vs. Super Bowl... Part I

While last night's Oscars provided few surprises in terms of the statues awarded - Kings Speech, yadda, yadda, yadda...  it did provide an interesting look into advertising strategy, as it is sometimes referred to as the "Super Bowl for women."

There is a whole lot of icky feeling and stereotyping in such a label - but I'll deal with that another time.  I'll also want to take a look at some of the advertisers who may have ran ads during both events, to illustrate different strategies for different audiences, etc...  Here, I wanted to take a quick look at the ad rates and the audiences to see which advertisers scored more bang for their buck.

The stats are plain - the Super Bowl outpaced the Oscars in both audience and ad rates:

Of course, the two are correlated (typically) - higher audiences yield higher ad rates.  It makes sense.

The Super Bowl may be more expensive in terms of price tag, but was it as efficient at delivering the audience?  Was it a good deal?

For this we have to calculate something [like] a CPM - the Cost Per Thousand of traditional print media quantification.  It's not a perfect match when shifting to Television, but it does give us some idea of how efficient the Super Bowl and/or the Oscars were at delivering audiences.

CPM is calculating by dividing the Ad Cost by the Audience and multiplying that by 1,000.  It tells us, literally, the cost to reach 1,000 people.

[Avert your eyes if math scares you]

Oscars - $1.7million Ad Cost/37.6 Million Viewers X 1,000 =  $45.21
Super Bowl - $3 million Ad Cost/111 Million Viewers X 1,000 = $27.27

So, the Super Bowl wins in efficiency too...  I, of course, am overlooking a BIG POINT here that might change the results.  What is it??

J.C. Penney Looks to Red Carpet to Rebrand... Again.

So it looks like J.C. Penney is hitting the red carpet again this year, with another "rebranding" strategy.  While last year's carpet was abuzz with Penney's new campaign focused on the "fashionable side" of JCP, this year's campaign is more subdued, simply unveiling a new logo...

[cue, screeching halt...]

Yes, another major brand is skating out onto the thin ice of logo regeneration.  The Gap's new logo (Left):

lasted barely a day, before consumer outcry via social media



led the company to revert back to the OLD logo (Right panel, above).  Gap joined the list of other brands - like Starbucks, and Comedy Central - that launched new logos to mixed reviews.

So, I was a bit surprised when I caught my first glimpse of Penney's new art (Right Panel):


Wait.  Did Penney's steal a page out of Gap's playbook?  Is it just me, or does the second "visual" look a lot like the Gap logo so hated by Gap customers?  Apparently our good friends on the internet make it easy to create your own "Gap" logo, and it kind of looks like Penney's took them up on this offer.

I'm not sure whether this "rebrand" will cause as much of a commotion as the Gap fiasco, which may be a good thing.  However, I am not sure this change is substantial enough to cause the splash that Penney's is looking for.   Apparently, the company is looking for is new "lowercaps" logo (that's right, the key difference here, if you didn't catch it, is that the new logo on the right (above) has dropped the JCP for jcp).  Earth shattering.

What really gets my goat is that brands continue to think that they can address and appeal to real shifts in consumer behavior within younger generations via surface aesthetics such as this.  Sure, Millenials are part of the "text generation" that eschew capitalization, but if brands think that they can woo them simply by "talking the talk" - all I can do is SMH.

brandDR shows her age... by blogging...

Today's New York Times essentially put the last nail in the coffin of my youth by declaring:

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. 

Great.  What better time to launch a blog than when they become irrelevant to a key demographic that will be driving marketing into the future.

But wait...  While the younger crowd may be turning away from blogging - moving towards more "social" media like Facebook and Twitter - it doesn't mean blogs are dead in the water.  Instead, it means that bloggers need to embrace these media as vehicles to drive traffic to their blogs.

Twitter allows us to reach broad audiences with short bursts of information.  Perfect for blasting out announcements of new blog posts.  Use of #hashtags to link to broader conversations can help spread the word outside our immediate network.

It's pretty easy to download the Twitter app for your Facebook account, so that your Tweets also post to your wall.  This is good news, since research shows that Facebook is more successful at generating clicks through bit.ly links.  This has been my experience.  Check out the stats for good old brandDR:

Pretty much all my hits come from Facebook.  With one click I can publish a new post to brandDR the blog, tweet it through @brandDR on Twitter, and have that tweet post to my DrKristin Comeforo Facebook page.  

I think that blogs are still relevant, especially if you link your blog through a variety of social media channels.  But still, a blog is only as good as your audience judges it to be.  Here are some tips I try to keep in mind to keep people reading:

1.  Have a voice - and speak from it.  People read blogs for a perspective, not just for facts.

2.  Be relevant.  Focus on topics that are important to you (the blogger) and your audience (hopefully you know who they are - if not, you should find out!).

3.  Keep it short.  No one wants to read a long post.  Videos and images are good ways to convey ideas without forcing a lot of reading (maybe this will bring back the younger generation of blog readers??).

4.  And when all else fails, when you are the Professor, you can always assign your blog as course reading. That will insure some sort of audience.

What do you think?  Any advice - especially from you in the "younger generation" in terms of what makes a good blog?  Any thoughts on the "death" of blogging?  Am I really that old, or is the Times' off target with its' predictions?

"Save the Money" turns into "Save Face" for Groupon

The Superbowl is quickly turning in a Superbawl for virgin big game advertiser, Groupon.  Sure the game was weeks ago but the fallout for poorly planned messaging is still raining hard on the brand.

Almost immediately after the [most offensive] ad ran, social media recoiled in horror and raised its voice of criticism.  Perhaps the best example

was retweeted by over 100 other Twitter users.

I hope you can envision the ad - call it back into your memory - because you won't see it anywhere, anymore.  Just to show the power of the Twitterverse and social media in general - this is what I found when I tried to view the Tibetan ad (the most offensive of the Superbowl spots) on YouTube:

The brandDR declares this a flat-line strategy.  Staying relevant in terms of current events that are important to key customers is important and laudable, but the execution is DOA.  "Dark" humor in ads may be an effective strategy, but not when dealing with a pressing social issue that has life or death implications on a group of people.