Last year, Iran issued a directive banning the printing and distribution of any goods promoting Valentine’s Day, including cards, gifts and teddy bears. “Printing and producing any goods related to this day including posters, boxes and cards emblazoned with hearts or half-hearts, red roses and any activities promoting this day are banned. Outlets that violate this will be legally dealt with.” This got me thinking. We should drop hearts, half-hearts, teddy bears and roses on Iran. Just a thought. -ES

As JWT’s newly appointed North American Chief Creative Officer Jeff Benjamin put it, “I have a policy — if somebody spams my wall, I remove them as a friend.” He’s talking about Facebook, of course, and his point makes a lot of sense. So why do so many brands spend so much time creating the sort of campaigns that clutter your newsfeed and leave that sort of processed-meat-food-in-a-rectangular-can taste in your mouth?

Ad Age and Creativity’s latest trend report explores what it takes for brands to “do good Facebook.” We gathered a roundtable of seasoned creatives, including Mr. Benjamin, a former CP&B co-CCO who helped steer notable Facebook campaigns such as Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice.” We were joined by his former Crispin colleague Paul Aaron, now digital executive creative director at Amalgamated; Tool’s Jason Zada, EVB co-founder turned director, who created one of the most viral Facebook efforts of last year in “Take This Lollipop”; Pereira & O’Dell Creative Director Jaime Robinson, who worked on the successful Intel-Toshiba “Inside” social film; Team Detroit ECD Scott Lange, who oversaw Ford’s “Doug” social-media puppet effort; and Jung Von Matt Limmat’s Livio Dainese, creative director on Graubünden Tourism’s “Obermutten Goes Global,” which earned a tiny Swiss town more Facebook action than the fan pages of Justin Beiber and Lady Gaga.

If you don’t know their work, you should. All of them have successfully navigated the social-media platform and created Facebook campaigns that people actually cared about. They discussed what works and what doesn’t, and “social skills” you need in order to truly interact with at least some of Facebook’s 800 million users.

We also dissected a number of the most-innovative Facebook efforts of the past 12 months, and noted what brands should keep in mind when trying to build a dedicated fan base on the platform.

Here, a taste of the lessons unearthed within the report.

Tell a story
One of the characteristics of the best advertising — no matter what platform — is that it tells a story.

Pereira & O’Dell told a gripping tale via Facebook and brought users into the creation process with the Intel-Toshiba “Inside” campaign. It engaged Facebook users in an evolving social film, in which their Facebook posts and own videos influenced the plotline — and helped the film’s lead character, played by Emmy Ludwig, escape from a room where a mysterious kidnapper has trapped her. The fans became a part of the story’s plotline, and they loved the campaign so much they created an online film thanking the brands for the experience.

In the case of Jung Von Matt Limmat’s Obermutten effort, the story was built into the PR strategy. The campaign invited Facebook fans to like the tiny Swiss town. As thanks, the Obermutten townspeople would post their fans’ profile pictures on the town’s physical community bulletin board and show the fans their posted mugs in album pictures. That set the stage for some interesting plot twists, such as what happens when the number of fans exceeds the real estate of the bulletin board? The photos had to be posted on the walls of local barns, which made for a great PR story.

The campaign earned Obermutten fans from 32 countries and generated about $2.4 million worth of media from a budget of only about about $10,800.

If you can, step into the real world
One smart strategy to give your Facebook campaign legs and sharing value is to extend it into the real world. The Intel/Toshiba campaign invited its fans to real-life events tied to the plotline of the evolving film. Obermutten tacked Facebook followers’ pictures onto physical walls.

Another campaign featured in the report, Heinz’s “Get Well Soup” out of the agency We Are Social in the U.K., allowed users to send their sick friends personalized cans of soup — extending the feel-better wishes they’d posted online all the way to their dining-room table.

An effort for Ariel laundry detergent out of Saatchi Stockholm showed off the strength of the cleaner with a robot that shot stains at a line of crisp, bright-white shirts. Facebook fans could control the ‘bots online, picking which “flavor” of stain to shoot. The shirts were then dunked into a vat of suds, after which they were dried and delivered in the mail to the culprits who soiled them.

Be social; be human
Perhaps brands’ first rule of doing good work on a social-media platform is to learn how to be truly social.

Earlier this year, Pfizer’s Chapstick experienced a social-media catastrophe when it did something very uncool. The brand posted a new ad on Facebook that highlighted a model’s voluptuous rump as she bent over a couch (she was searching for her lip balm). Consumers deemed it sexist and started posting negative comments on Chapstick’s Facebook wall. Chapstick responded by deleting the unfavorable posts. Ironically, the ad’s copy read, “Be heard at Facebook.com/Chapstick.” That, of course, drew even more fire from consumers and the press.

Chapstick proved to be one of those that just doesn’t get how to be on Facebook. As Jeff Benjamin said, “Brands need to evolve culturally and become social brands. When a brand is on Facebook and you feel like it probably shouldn’t be there, it’s that the brand hasn’t figured out how to communicate in 2011. If that brand wants to survive, it needs to become a more social brand and figure out how to communicate socially.”

-Advertising Age, January 30, 2012

I still remember when I learned cursive. It was a landmark moment. Going from a classroom with the Alphabet in print letters above the blackboard to one with cursive made me feel so cool and mature. I wouldn’t have that feeling again until I got my driver’s license.

Well, one day last week, I decided to spend an entire day writing in cursive again.

It. Was. A. Blast.

As someone who hates wasting time, I loved not having to pick up my pen from the paper as often. It’s so much more efficient to connect the letters. And you know what else? I wrote more that day than usual because I was getting such a kick out of writing in cursive again. It ranged from work stuff to nonsense. I wrote the name Theodore 12 times and I don’t even know any Theodores.

And it was nostalgic. Memories came flooding back — like how much I hated cursive G’s or the time my 7th grade teacher told me she couldn’t distinguish my o’s from my a’s from my e’s and I told her to try using context clues.

Why did I stop using cursive?

Do they even teach cursive anymore?

Is there anything more beautiful than a cursive Theodore? -HF

I’m just not wired for golf. I don’t like it. I’m not good at it. And yet, I’m one of those guys who swings an imaginary golf club all the time – in elevators, in line at the salad place, standing around the office.

It’s a problem. But the weirdest part about these imaginary golf swings?

I’ve been keeping score.

It turns out that I’m an incredible imaginary golfer. No, I’m better than incredible. I’m the Tiger-Woods-Before-His-Divorce of imaginary golf. First of all, I never swing and miss. Ever. My imaginary drives are 300 yards, right down the middle of the imaginary fairway. I do need to work on my imaginary short game, but come on, who doesn’t?

My imaginary handicap is 2, which in case you’re not a golf fan, is awesome. Next month I will compete for a spot in the Wells Fargo Imaginary Invitational, in which I hope to win an imaginary trophy and get sponsored by an imaginary company that makes imaginary golf shorts, gloves and visors.

I even watch imaginary golf on TV. Usually while playing air guitar. -HF

Market innovation has long been dominated by the world view of engineers and economists – build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. But Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron argue the merits of cultural innovation instead.

This functional point of view certainly has merit. But, because it is the only way that we approach innovation, the ‘better mousetraps’ approach has had the effect of eclipsing a very different innovation world view – champion a better ideology and the world will take notice as well.

This phenomenon is found everywhere in consumer markets. For example, farmer-cookbook-author-television host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, author Michael Pollan, the international Slow-Food movement, and the American grocery retailer Whole Foods Market, among others, have transformed food consumption for the middle and upper-middle class. These cultural innovators have championed an alternative approach to agriculture and food as an ideological challenge to the dominant scientific-industrial food ideology.

These better-mousetraps innovation models are based on the world view of the economist and the engineer, but there is more to the world of innovation than new product design alone.

They have brought to life the value, even necessity, of winding the clock back to some sort of pre-industrial food culture in such a way that it is irresistible for the upper middle class in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Relying upon what we term myth and cultural codes, these cultural innovators have massively transformed food preferences.

We call this phenomenon cultural innovation. Cultural innovation has been ignored by management strategists, despite its pivotal role in launching and reinvigorating any number of billion-dollar businesses. The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Marlboro, Method, Whole Foods, Dove, Red Bull, Harley-Davidson, the Mini, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and Snapple, to name a few, have all profited from cultural innovations. When these enterprises advanced a more compelling ideology – leapfrogging the staid cultural orthodoxies of their categories -consumers beat a path to their doors.

THE SEARCH FOR BETTER MOUSETRAPS

Launching ‘the next big thing’ – the innovative idea that resonates powerfully with consumers and takes off to establish a profitable new business – is the holy grail of managers and entrepreneurs alike. Strategy experts have been offering advice on how to identify and exploit such opportunities for decades.

Fifteen years ago, Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad offered a pioneering call to arms. To ‘create the markets of tomorrow’ they urged managers to focus on industry foresight and strategic intent. To avoid getting bogged down in an established market’s internecine tactical battles, they encouraged managers to stake out new market space – what they famously termed white space – in order to create and dominate emerging opportunities.

More than a decade later, W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne introduced a new metaphor – blue ocean – to dramatise a very similar idea.

Existing markets are characterised by dog-eat-dog fights to outdo competitors on a conventional set of benefits. Incumbents rely on incremental changes in product and tactical marketing to fight over thin margins. This, according to Kim and Mauborgne, is a red ocean. In order to develop future-leading businesses, companies must reject the conventions of the category to craft ‘value innovations’ that have no direct competition – blue oceans.

These marching orders have inspired many managers and entrepreneurs. But what kinds of future opportunities should we be looking for? And how does one actually go about spotting these opportunities and designing new concepts that will take advantage of the blue oceans? Innovation experts have offered us two paths.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

For most innovation experts, future opportunities mean one thing – the commercialisation of new technologies. Technologydriven innovations are the stars of business. From historic innovations such as the light bulb, the telephone, the television, the Model T, and the personal computer to recent stars like the iPod, Amazon.com, BlackBerry Viagra, and Facebook, the commercialisation of breakthrough technologies has clearly had a huge impact on business and society.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma and subsequent books, Clayton Christensen argues that new technologies allow companies to design ‘disruptive innovations’ that transform their categories. Disruptive innovations are products and services that trump the value delivered by existing category offerings because they are cheaper, more useful, more reliable, or more convenient.

MIX-AND-MATCH INNOVATION

In recent years, a ‘mix-and-match’ approach to innovation has become influential. According to Kim and Mauborgne, in order for companies to offer customers a significantly better value proposition, they must methodically break the rules of their existing category: subtracting and enhancing conventional benefits, as well as importing new ones from other categories.

For instance, in Blue Ocean Strategy’s lead example, the authors describe how Cirque du Soleil created a blue ocean by borrowing from theatre and Broadway musicals to reinvent the circus.

These better-mousetraps innovation models are based on the world view of the economist and the engineer – a world in which it is only the material properties of what we buy that are important.

CONSUMERS SEE INNOVATION DIFFERENTLY

Consumers – the ultimate arbiters of market innovation efforts – often find offerings to be innovative even though they seem quite pedestrian from a product-design standpoint. It turns out that blockbuster new businesses do not necessarily require radically new features that fundamentally alter the value proposition.

Consider beer. From a better-mousetraps perspective, the American beer market has long been a mature category – a notoriously red ocean that resists innovation. Many product innovation efforts have been tried, and the vast majority have failed despite their seeming combinatorial creativity.

Brewers have tried to follow blue-ocean strategy for many years. Combining concepts across categories, they have launched beer+energy drinks (Sparks, Be), beer+tequila (Tequiza), beer+soft drinks (Zima), and so on. All these supposed innovations were failures in the mass market.

Now let us look at the beer category from an ideological viewpoint. While the product – the beer itself- has seen only minor changes over the past 30 years, the category has been very dynamic in terms of the cultural expressions that consumers value. Incumbents have been pushed aside by new entrants with a better ideology.

In the popular-price tier, Budweiser took off in the 1980s with branding that showcased men working cheerfully and industriously in artisanal trades, men whom Budweiser beer saluted with a baritone-voiced announcer proclaiming: ‘This Bud’s for you!’ The results were startling. The beer brand quickly became the go-to choice for working-class American men. By the middle of the decade, Budweiser was unchallenged as the most desirable beer in the country.

By the early 1990s, Bud’s ideology had lost resonance and the business sank, to be replaced by its stable mate. Bud Light took off in the 1990s to become by far the dominant American beer brand, speeding past the brand that had pioneered light beer as a product innovation, Miller Lite. Bud Light tastes little different from Miller Lite. Rather what was different was a decade’s worth of silly Peter Pan stories of men who engage in all sorts of juvenile high jinks, which conjured up a new kind of rebellious masculinity for adult men.

Consider soft drinks – a category that would seem to be one of the most masochistic red oceans around. The two leading softdrinks marketers in the world, PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to innovate their way out of this mature category.

Both companies have aggressively pursued mix-and-match concepts to create new value propositions. For example, The Coca-Cola Company has made big bets on Coke Blak (coca-cola+coffee) and Enviga (a ‘calorie-burning’ green tea). Both of these ambitious efforts -supposedly targeting distinctive consumer ‘need states’ – failed to break through.

ENTER THE CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURS

While the food scientists were struggling to make odd-ball mix-and-match drinks combinations, cultural entrepreneurs were playing an entirely different game. They pursued radical innovations in culture, not product.

The most familiar example of this in the United Kingdom is Innocent Drinks. The market for alternative natural fruit smoothies had long been established in the US, pioneered by Odwalla (est. 1980) and Fresh Samantha (est. 1992). The big UK grocers such as Marks & Spencer, Salisbury’s, and Tesco imported the concept and developed their own versions.

Innocent easily won over consumers who were worried about health issues by making a cultural assertion – championing the pre-industrial purity of ‘only fruit’ against drinks full of preservatives and synthetic ingredients.

The Coca-Cola Company, which had paid Si80m to buy out the ideologically innovative Odwalla in 2001, followed suit by paying S50m for about 15% of Innocent in 2009 – a S333m valuation.

Failing at its better-mousetraps innovation strategy, Coca-Cola has had no choice but to acquire ideologically innovative brands at very steep prices.

These businesses have been every bit as innovative as the technological and mix-and-match businesses celebrated by innovation experts. But what was radical about them was what the product stands for – its ideology, which, when staged through myth and cultural codes, becomes a distinctive cultural expression.

Furthermore, many technological innovations can benefit from innovative ideology as well. Cultural innovations have turbocharged many better mousetraps including Apple, Google, Mini, Red Bull, JetBlue, and Wikipedia.

THE TRAPS IN ‘MINDSHARE’ MARKETING

We might expect that the discipline of marketing would play a leading role in the development of strategy for cultural innovation. Yet, conventional marketing – what we term mindshare marketing because it is couched in psychology -emphasises the day-to-day stewardship of existing businesses and, in so doing, slights cultural innovation.

Depending on the company and category, today’s mindshare strategies focus either on ‘functional benefits’ (sometimes termed ‘rational benefits’), or on ‘emotional benefits’, or on both.

THE FUNCTIONAL BENEFITS TRAP

Mindshare marketing relies on an easy and intuitively appealing metaphor: brands succeed when they colonise valued ‘cognitive territory’ in consumer minds. The model directs managers to determine the cognitive ‘gap’: which functional benefit in a given category is most valued by consumers and least dominated by other brands? Targeting the gap, the marketing goal is to stake out a claim to the cognitive association in consumers’ minds, then hammer home the connection between the trademark and the benefit claim as simply and consistently and frequently as possible.

Over time, according to the theory consumers would unconsciously associate the brand with the benefit, and as a result the brand would come to ‘own’ (in a cognitive sense) the benefit.

The functional benefits model is most useful when a product really does command a novel functionality that gives the brand a substantial and durable advantage over competitors. In such instances, the mindshare model simply reinforces what economists have been preaching about reputation effects for decades. Such advantages, however, are hard to come by, and, when a new technology with a truly improved performance is introduced, it is summarily copied by competitors.

THE COMMODITY EMOTIONS TRAP

Unfortunately the new style of mindshare marketing has proven to be more problematic. To avoid the functional benefits trap, many marketers now focus on identifying what they term ‘emotional benefits’, which are the softer values, thoughts, and feelings that consumers associate with the product, brand, or category. Although the intentions may seem noble and sophisticated, ‘laddering up’ to the consumer’s ‘higher order values’, or ‘probing deeper’ to unveil the consumer’s ‘fundamental need-states’ and the ‘brand truth’ is anything but that.

In practice, the result is simply to push for vague abstractions that hold a negligible value for consumers. At least functional benefits forced marketers to remain grounded in the product’s material performance. There are no constraints at all for emotional benefits: all emotions are fair game. We are witnessing an emotions ‘arms race’ in which companies vie to own one of the shortlists of top emotion words.

This process encourages companies to pursue generic ‘emotional territories’ that any brand in any category can claim. Coca- Cola becomes the champion of ‘happiness’, Pepsi becomes the champion of ‘joy’, Fanta becomes the champion of ‘play’, Snapple becomes the champion of ‘fun’. The marketers at Oscar Mayer, the lunch-meats and bacon brand, have launched a S50m advertising campaign consisting entirely of slice-of-life vignettes featuring people being happy while eating Oscar Meyer and the tagline ‘It Doesn’t Get Better Than This’. The company expects that these ads will ‘recapture the joy and exuberance’ of the brand.

These emotion words blur into a fuzzy sameness. Levi’s becomes the champion of ‘confidence’ and ‘freedom’. But so do Lee Jeans and Guess Jeans. For that matter, so do Oxford Health Insurance, Volvo Station Wagons, and Verizon Mobile telephone plans.

Only through such a process could Procter & Gamble house a pregnancy test, a washing powder, an oral hygiene brand, a feminine hygiene brand, a line of cosmetics, and an antiperspirant, all of which offer ‘confidence’ or ‘confidence in results’.

While the pursuit of emotional benefits has helped many a brand manager avoid the functional benefits trap, the unintentional consequence is to land in an even more strategically bereft space -what we term the commodity emotions trap. Emotional benefits render the brand even less distinctive, from a consumer’s perspective.

As with the functional approach, emotional branding drives brands to mimic the cultural orthodoxy of the category. Mindshare marketing not only limits innovation, it creates red oceans.

PSYCHOLOGY TO BLAME

Ultimately both the functional and emotional benefits tangents of mindshare marketing are severely limited as innovation tools because they are rooted in psychology. Both approaches imply that marketing is about embedding associations between brand and valued benefits in consumers’ minds. As a property of mind, the brand and its benefits are both assumed to be durable and contextless.

Mindshare marketers’ favoured terms for a brand’s key benefits – brand essence and brand DNA – reflect this assumption. Because the strategic core of the brand has no connection to society or history, mindshare marketers push the job of making their brands resonate with consumers onto their creative partners. They are charged with injecting some ‘trends’ or ‘fame’ or ‘cool’ into the brand in an effort to make it relevant.

Conceiving of brands as a phenomenon of the mind – rather than of society, culture, and politics – means that opportunities for innovation created by historical changes in society are totally ignored.

BRANDS ARE ROOTED IN CULTURE

People always want better functionality. Ideological opportunities, in contrast, are produced by major historical changes that shake up cultural conventions of the category what we call a social disruption. These shifts unmoor consumers from incumbent brands, and prod them to seek new alternatives. It is an emergent kind of opportunity that is specific to a historical moment and a particular group of people. Likewise, the cultural innovations that respond to these opportunities are fundamentally different from better mousetraps. They are composed of specific cultural expressions, which are conveyed by the brand across consumer touchpoints.

Powerful cultural expressions can be dramatised via product design (Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, Vitaminwater), print ads (Jack Daniel’s), guerrilla stunts (Ben & Jerry’s, Fuse), corporate business policies (Ben & Jerry’s, Fat Tire, Freelancers Union), retail design (Starbucks), packaging (Starbucks, Vitaminwater), the service encounter (Starbucks), naming (Vitaminwater), outdoor media (Freelancers Union), and television ads (Nike, Marlboro, Clearblue, Fat Tire, Levi’s, ESPN). All touchpoints are fair game for cultural innovation.

Can cultural innovation become a systematic pursuit? We have learned that it can. For the past decade we have engaged in a ‘cultural innovation laboratory’ of sorts: we conducted academic research on dozens of these successes while also consulting to a wide variety of companies to develop cultural innovations for them.

The result is what we call cultural strategy: a six-step cultural innovation framework supported by a systematic toolkit of cultural research methods. We have successfully applied our cultural innovation model to blue-chip brands such as Coca- Cola, Mini, Ben & Jerry’s and Converse, as well as to smaller entrepreneurial brands such as Fuse music television, Svedka vodka, Freelancers Union health insurance, and Fat Tire beer.

Ideological opportunities provide one of the most fertile grounds for market innovation. Yet, these opportunities have gone unrecognised because of the extraordinary influence of economics, engineering, and psychology on management thinking. These disciplines, as different as they are, share a common assumption – in order to simplify the world, they purposely ignore cultural context and historical change. These theories remove all the messy bits of human life in order to present a tidy theory that is easy for big companies to work with. We argue that it is in these untidy hard-to-measure parts of social life that some of the greatest innovation opportunities lie.

About the Author

Douglas Holt is president of the Cultural Strategy Group, a cultural innovation consultancy. dough@culturalstrategygroup.com
Douglas Cameron is founder and chief strategy officer of Amalgamated. dcameron@amalgamatednyc.com

his article is excerpted from Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford University
Press, 2010). You can learn more about cultural strategy at culturalstrategygroup.com

For the fourth consecutive year, Zeta Interactive, an interactive marketing agency, has released a report of which ad campaigns generated the most buzz online. Zeta uses a technology that monitors what consumers are saying about online ads that they see on blogs and on video sharing and social media sites.

Zeta Interactive gives ads scores reflecting the volume, or the total number of posts each ad had per day, and tone, or the number of positive or negative posts about the ad. The company analyzed more than 200 million online posts.

This year, of the top 10 ads, eight made their debuts during the Super Bowl. In 2010, only four on the list made their debuts during the Super Bowl.

At the top of the list was an ad for E*Trade Financial called “Enzo the Tailor,” which featured a baby being fitted for a custom-made suit and talking about how his tailor could retire in Tuscany. The spot was made by Grey New York, part of the Grey Group unit of WPP.

Both E*Trade and Snickers, whose “Logging” spot featuring Roseanne Barr and Richard Lewis was the seventh ad on the list, showed how some brands were able to have success in campaigns with recurring themes, said Mary Beth Keelty, vice president for marketing at Zeta. “They found something that worked and they are refreshing it,” she said.

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The Snickers spot was created by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group. Snickers was the only brand to have a repeat appearance on the list this year.

Automobile ads were popular with digital consumers as well, with Volkswagen’s ad featuring a young boy dressed as Darth Vader, and Chrysler’s ad featuring the rap artist Eminem and the city of Detroit, taking the second and third spots, respectively. The Volkswagen ad was created by Deutsch LA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, and the Chrysler ad was created by Wieden & Kennedy.

“Cars really were a big part of the top 10 here,” said Minna Rhee, Zeta’s chief executive. The auto ads were a “reflection of coming out of the recession and the car industry taking a bigger role in 2011,” she said.

Other car ads in the top 10 included Mercedes-Benz’s ad featuring the artist Diddy, in the ninth spot on the list, and an ad for Nissan’s Leaf in the eighth spot. The Nissan ad, called “Gas Powered Everything,” shows people using everyday items like alarm clocks and hair dryers that are powered by gas engines. It featured a new trend on the list — the eco-conscious ad. The spot was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.

An animated ad for Chipotle Mexican Grill, called “Back to the Start,” was the fourth most popular ad on the list. The ad, which was also shown in movie theaters, tells the story of the industrialization of farming. The film, which was more than two minutes long, was directed by Johnny Kelly and featured a Willie Nelson version of the Coldplay song “The Scientist.”

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The ad demonstrated that it is possible for brands “to break that top 10 with something that wasn’t necessarily with TV at the center of what the campaign was about,” Ms. Rhee said. The Chipotle ad also tied with an ad for the PepsiCo beverage H2oh! for the most positive tonal ranking. The H2oh ad, which was created by BBDO Argentina, was the first and only ad in Spanish to make the list.

Bud Light and CarMax rounded out the list in fifth and sixth place, respectively. Bud Light’s commercial, “Product Placement,” featured swashbucklers on a movie set, while CarMax’s spot, “Kid in a Candy Store,” promoted its selection of auto and money-back guarantee.

The Bud Light commercial was created by DDB Chicago, part of DDB Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group. The CarMax ad was created by Amalgamated New York.

-The New York Times, December 28, 2011

Ultimat Vodka Emerges As The Iconic Vodka For People Seeking To ‘Find Balance’

There’s no denying that the spirits industry is as much about lifestyle as it is about liquor.

On any given bar on any given night there are a multitude of bottles resting on the back bar, many of them filled with what is undeniably the most consumed spirit, vodka. Though every bottle back there can be visually recognized by its own unique shape and label, each is really desired both based on the taste of the juice inside and, sometimes even more than the taste, what drinking that brand says about the drinker. That wide selection of vodkas sitting behind the bartender each offers up its own identity for the guest/shopper; an anthropomorphized confirmation of who and what they are and how they fit into the social universe.

What gets poured most often, and then reordered, depends as much on the bar or liquor shop’s clientele and their desires, income, and interests, as it does on the bottle and liquid itself. The call brands are just that, “called for” because they speak to their consumer. Some say “I’m sophisticated,” some say “I appreciate good lineage,” and some simply say “I’ll have what he’s having.” Ultimat, with its cobalt blue perfume-styled bottle, is the rare brand that stands out on its own; presenting a strong visual image that is noticeable to all but especially appealing to the individual who is striking out on his own path, leading the pack and forging the way. This is a brand for a pioneer who recognizes that he needs to balance his time working hard and playing hard and feels justified seeking out his ultimate rewards when he’s done doing both. For this drinker quality is important but so is treating himself and his friends and family well. He’s willing to indulge in life’s little luxuries to make sure that’s the case.

Being able to indulge oneself with a particular brand leads to a very positive view of that spirit. Greg Cohen, Director of Communications for The Patrón Spirits Company (which owns Ultimat), remarks, “Of the higher quality vodkas it is an image driven category – so we have an opportunity and a point of differentiation. For people who do order their vodka based on ‘what it says about me’ this is a brand that they’ll adopt.”

He continues, “Ultimat has all the makings to be the next superstar on the bar. The time is right for this brand. Though I think that there are some very good vodka brands of high quality that are popular on the market, Ultimat is for people who want to walk up to the bar and say, ‘I know what I am talking about. Everyone else might be drinking that brand, but not me, I’m drinking Ultimat.’ That has a lot of power.”

It’s a powerful message that the guest/customer is sending about himself and his choices. By making this choice he is saying, through drink, that he is powerful. Which makes this an important group to reach on a visceral level whether you’re a bar owner or retailer. Connecting with this kind of customer who selects Ultimat vodka because it, as Cohen notes, “Shows you have sophistication, a mind of your own and you understand what a quality product is and you’re not just drinking what everyone else is drinking. You didn’t get where you’ve gotten in life by being a follower.” That’s important because this is the drinker who is poised to be an ambassador for the brand and help you sell more vodka and vodka cocktails. Empowering them with the experience of selecting Ultimat means you’re giving them the tool to be the ones who introduce their colleagues to something new, reinforcing their image as trendsetting early adopters.

Adopting a new vodka isn’t always easy for those committed to a brand but there’s an interesting message that Ultimat can deliver to entice these leaders into the fold. Matt Ellis-Escobar, The Patrón Spirits Company State Manager of Southern California remarks, “Once the consumer does try it, they can recognize its quality. We have a sophisticated look to our packaging.”

Offering a sophisticated looking package is great the first time around, but being able to get them back once they realize the quality is dependent upon the depth of the spirit that comes from being a unique combination of wheat, rye and potato. Says Cohen, “All the nice packaging in the world – none of it matters if you don’t have a quality product. That’s a given. And so, yes, we do have a marketing campaign behind it and a nice bottle, but what’s really important about this brand, and what bartenders can credibly tell their customers, is that it is made unlike any other. It is made from a combination of wheat, rye and potato; lots of other vodkas are wheat or rye or potato, but none are all three.”

Why put these three together? In creating the Ultimat spirit it became evident that the three ingredients together gives a complexity and a rich mouth feel. Cohen continues, “It’s such a versatile spirit and versatile brand; it does mix well into everything. Better spirits make better cocktails. So, whether you’re mixing it with something that is going to mask the vodka more than others you’re still going to have a better drink. Of course you’ll taste and enjoy the difference when you enjoy it on its own or with a light mixer.”

Whether they are mixing it or drinking it chilled it’s having a positive impact on both consumers and bartenders according to Laura Becraft, Ultimat US Sales Manager with The Patrón Spirits Company. She says, “It’s the only vodka in the world made from wheat, potato and rye and all three ingredients combined give it a different complexity to other vodkas. It seems that with a lot of mixologists today the more complex something is the more they like it. A lot of mixologists, especially in Miami, are interested in working with it because of that. And the consumers love it too. They pick up a little bit of the potato right away and they realize it’s a great vodka.”

Initial consumer and bartender/beverage manager adoption is why the brand is willing to put $8 million behind a new ad campaign. Cohen explains, “For an emerging brand like this there aren’t too many companies that would invest that kind of support. But we believe in this brand and have such confidence about the staying power of this brand it’s an investment we’re all too happy to make. It’s a crowded field – in order to be noticed we have to do something to stand out and we truly believe that once people find it, taste it, and experience it, they’ll come back to it.”

For the trade that’s an important message. Cohen notes, “We’re not just saying here’s a new bottle, put it on your bar, let’s hope someone orders it. We want to help them move product. Because we have strong local distributors and representatives in most of all of the major markets, we’ve built very good relationships and trust among the trade that we only produce high quality products. And we do what we say we’re going to do. Right there, the fact that Patrón Spirits is behind this brand hopefully sends a message that we’re serious about this new product.”

Supporting this belief is a brand new advertising campaign, which was created by Amalgamated and designed to include print, outdoor and online advertising executions as well as a social media presence. The roll out from this new agency kicked off last month and targets an audience the brand expects will be receptive to the approximately $40 price tag. The ad campaign uses humor to capture the attention of a mostly white-collar professional drinker and ends with the tagline, “Find Balance. Find Ultimat.” Ads like the one that proclaims: “You work for the best firm in the city. You make seven figures. You spend less time outside than prisoners on Rikers Island.” Or the one that reads: “Your kids love their Christmas gifts. Your wife adores the diamond earrings. They called your office to tell you.” really hit home with this segment of the population. Cohen explains, “We’re targeting those hard working, white collar professionals who work too much and relax too little. We’re going after that demographic area of people, particularly in the financial field where the hours are long. You experience this whether you’re an investment banker or a stock broker or a lawyer or any other profession these days. You spend so much time at work you need to find balance between the necessity of work and the necessity of play. And the campaign resonates with people who find themselves in this circumstance most days. Find Balance, Find Ultimat speaks to that of course but also speaks to the fact that you need to take some time for yourself and a great way to do that is to enjoy a cocktail. That’s the message.”

He continues, “and then the find balance refers to the product itself – it’s a balance of wheat rye and potato so it works on a rational and emotional level as well.” A number of digital elements like Facebook apps and other things that are intended to engage consumers are on the way. Understanding that this audience can’t always have an Ultimat in their hand doesn’t mean that Ultimat can’t provide balance all the time. Cohen says, “We’re doing things that hit those people in their diverse outlets. There are certainly a lot of young Wall Streeters and lawyers who use social media as a release.”

Also being able to touch the consumer in a variety of environments from resorts to restaurants and nightclubs is another plus in the Ultimat column. Ellis-Escobar notes, “I think our restaurant/hotel business is larger. Though we have accounts in the club segment we’ve got twice as many in the restaurant/hotel space. Quarter after quarter it seems the food scene is becoming more and more sophisticated. The step towards the sophistication in the restaurant world was needed. People know what they’re eating. It’s now translating into not only what am I eating but what am I drinking? Is there anything new? Ultimat’s presence allows for a lot of new trial.”

Operators like that. Ellis-Escobar continues, “The vodka drinker has not gone away. Individual owner/operators see how Ultimat contributes to their success because they are cultivating customers who do like to find new and upcoming brands. This brand early on has been offering an introduction to something new. And consumers appreciate that.”

Christian Corben, Director of Operations for the Innovative Restaurant Group (Kitana, Boa, Sushi Roku) comments, “I think people are trying new spirits these days. They want to try something different with the mixology trend. They want to try different vodkas that stand out. When anyone comes into the restaurant we want to create a new experience. We’re trying to educate and get them to try something new and get their adventurous sense up so they will try other cocktails.”

A willingness to try other cocktails is enhanced by the fact that Ultimat doesn’t stand alone; through its ads it has become common knowledge that the brand is part of The Patrón Spirits Company. Ellis-Escobar notes, Having it associated with the Patrón portfolio really helps. We always try to express that we are The Patrón Spirits Company, not just tequila, and inform consumer awareness.” This connection to the larger portfolio which includes not only tequila but also rum (Pyrat) means that consumers make the connection between Ultimat and the significant charity work that the parent company undertakes. Becraft explains, “Our whole company from the top down is a very charitable company. It helps the consumer in the long run when they go to make a purchase in a liquor store they know that Ultimat is a charitable brand. And why not give back to somebody? People want to make a purchase and it feels good knowing your money is going to a company that is charitable and gives back.”

A most recent example of the company’s commitment to the community was turning over their full page ad space in five national magazines so that Action Against Hunger could promote their effort to put an end to childhood nutrition.
Cohen concludes, “Spirits are the social glue. People bond, friends get together, family gets together over cocktails and it’s a very social occasion when you’re enjoying a cocktail. And so because of that better cocktails and better spirits enhance that overall occasion.”

-BIN, 2011

Halls’ ‘Uva Verde’
After the Kraft Foods-owned brand Halls discontinued its green-grape flavor in Brazil late last year, cough-drop enthusiasts took to social media to demand its return. Kraft relented, then commissioned Agency Espalhe Guerrilha Marketing to hire artists to create busts of three fans out of 5,000 units of Uva Verde. The agency also ran a Facebook campaign to find a fourth subject.

Small Business Saturday
Social media again played a central role in the second year of “Small Business Saturday” — an American Express-led effort to drive shoppers to local retailers on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Facebook offered a $100 ad credit to the first 10,000 businesses that registered. The page has more than 2.7 million fans, compared with 1.2 million last year, and #SmallBizSaturday trended on Twitter. Crispin Porter & Bogusky developed the campaign with Digitas.

‘True Blood’
HBO hyped the Season 4 premiere of “True Blood” by creating a Facebook app, “Immortalize Yourself,” which enabled fans to produce videos of themselves with real characters and Facebook friends. The app pulled in data from users’ profiles to generate the videos, which could feature random or specific Facebook friends. It was developed for HBO by Definition 6.

Heinz
Heinz partnered with the We Are Social agency for a U.K. campaign launched at the start of cold and flu season. It enabled Facebook fans to send sick friends cans of cream of tomato or chicken soup. For a $3 fee, a user could buy the can of soup, which was inscribed with the recipient’s name and shipped, arriving at its destination within three to four working days. It would bear the greeting “Get Well Soon” and the sender’s name.

Ultimat Vodka
Ultimat Vodka unveiled a Facebook app called the Social Life Audit that uses the site’s facial recognition API to calculate how much fun users are having in their photos, and gender analysis to see if there’s hookup potential. The app employs BlackBook’s database of 2.5 million hot spots to cross-check against Facebook check-ins to see if users are going to trendy places. Amalgamated did the campaign, and Stink Digital was the app developer.

Citroën
Netherlands residents could win a Citroën DS5 when the company sponsored a daylong “Twitter race,” in which TV presenter Froukje de Both drove the car while a co-pilot read directions off Twitter. People urged de Both to come to their location by tweeting #ds5race. The winner was the first person to retweet the final message from the car. Euro RSCG Amsterdam and Perfect Fools teamed up for the campaign.

Volkswagen
Volkswagen built an app on its Netherlands Facebook page asking fans to vote for their favorite classic car — the T1 or Beetle — for a chance at getting the “Fanwagen,” which is the winning model tricked out with social features. The lucky owner can print out a Facebook news feed inside the Fanwagen and display relationship status on the license plate. Dutch agency Achtung! was behind the campaign.

Flair
Belgian fashion magazine Flair built a Facebook app, Fashion Tag, to help users find out where their friends discovered their best outfits. Created by Duval Guillaume, Brussels, the app lets users tag friends’ clothing and accessories and then post on their walls to ask where they got the corresponding item. The answered fashion tags appeared in a special Facebook gallery, and the best of the best were featured in the pages of the weekly magazine.

Intel-Toshiba
Intel and Toshiba worked on “The Inside Experience,” an interactive movie/social-media campaign starring Emmy Rossum as Christina Perasso, who’s been abducted and can only transmit clues about her location via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on the laptop she’s been left with (also the subject of the promotion). Fans had to collaboratively unravel the mystery with clues from Christina. The campaign was the brainchild of Pereira & O’Dell.

-Advertising Age, December 12, 2011

Here are just some of the random thoughts I’ve had while waiting for and/or riding in New York’s slowest elevator:

Pretty sure Banksy is behind planking.

Technically, you don’t NEED a jump rope to jump rope.

The tagline for the movie Under Seige, in which Steven Seagal plays a Navy cook who is also a Navy SEAL, should have been, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some legs.”

Former Presidents are forever referred to as Mr. President. Former boxing champs are forever referred to as Champ. I’m glad it doesn’t work that way for former employees of Blockbuster Video.

Sun-dried tomatoes have great marketing people. If raisins had the same people, they’d be called sun-dried grapes.

I’d sell a lot of books if I changed my name to J.P. Salinger.

-HF