Canuckflack

Hey! We all lose an hour of sleep Sunday morning thanks to daylight savings time (except Saskatchewan - don’t ask). Stuart Elliott’s covered the PR and marketing gimmicks now associated with the changeover.

Old Navy’s pushing flip flops, Swatch is hawking watches, Olay is pushing anti-aging products, and we all know that Duracell REALLY cares about your smoke detector.

What ideas can you think of to leverage your client’s issues?

- New town slogan: “Another year out of bankruptcy!”
- Agrifood lobbyist: “It’s a season for change: genetically modified milk”
- Cabbies: “We change our brakes, whether we need to or not!”
- Cleaning company: “Have you looked at your urinal cakes recently?”
- New York Mets: “It’s a new year, and we have brand new pipe dreams”
- Adult gift store: “Do you still get a buzz out of life?” (co-promotion with Duracell)

Bubbles is throwing out the first pitch on opening day for the Toronto Blue Jays. A great promotional gimmick, but not necessarily a good omen for the team’s fortunes this year.

A prediction from Jupiter’s Gary Stein: feedback marketing is the wave of the future:

Marketing deparments exist in data vacuums; they are constantly asked to make decisions about both products and communications with data that is out of date or gathered under artificial circumstances. The use of the Internet to open up that data feed is my pick for most innovative use of the Web, 2005.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly groundbreaking about using customer feedback as an integral part of marketing and product development decisions. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak: can company reps pull the right information out of the pudding of impressions, opinions, blog comments, and other minutiae floating in the ‘net ether? And can they properly analyse it to guide their decision making?

After all - everyone who was asked seemed to like New Coke.

But what about another variant of feedback? Rock n’ roll feedback? Jimi Hendrix feedback? The distortion of the marketing message as a result of consumer anger and hatred of a company?

How are companies preparing for that feedback? Have they created “dashboards” to measure negative emotion by product, line, region and brand? Or are they just waiting for letters of complaint from the BBB and the local newspaper’s agony aunt? Even worse - are consumer complaints piling up, unattended, in the webmaster@brandname.com mailbox?

And how is your PR firm ready to help them?

Thanks to PC4Media for the pointer.

And I don’t mean the usual suspects cleanly edited by business-minded professionals: I mean the quirky and the amusing, the slightly odd and the informative. Something that stretches your normal listening habits.

Being old enough to remember a time before the ‘net (the 80s), I’ve developed two strategies for finding new and interesting radio programming:

The Random Radio Dial: For some reason, I am frequently awake at 4 or 5 in the morning. If the sky is clear and distant weather patterns are relatively stable, I can pick up distant radio stations on my AM dial. That means hours listening to Curtis and Kuby on WABC, Todd Wright AllNight on ESPN Chicago, even the monotonous WSB newsradio in Atlanta.

This strategy has some fundamental weaknesses, however. You can break the knob on the radio trying to dial in a long distance mono broadcast. The quality of AM radio today is a real damper as well. Why do all newscasters sound like they graduated from the Generic MidWestern White Guy School of Broadcasting, and why are they all reading the same AP morning hilites package? Also, relying on solar flares and rain patterns in the Carolinas is no way to program your audio habits.

The University/College Radio Station: The low power solution to the media oligopoly choking local radio markets. Sure, if you live more than ten blocks from campus, you may have to extend your radio antenna - out onto the roof and down the rain gutter. Then there are the endless requests for “listener support” and more volunteer help.

Oh - and the hosts are uniformly loopy. They may be experts in their field, but they drink coffee between sentences, make impromptu decisions to play the entire B side of Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti to cover a run to McDonald’s - and then eat their Big Mac while conducting a phone interview with an agricultural reform activist speaking from a payphone in Poughkeepsie.

And who has the time to continually mark up the broadcast schedule (printed on thin newsprint in the back of the local alternative monthly) to reflect all the guest hosts, schedule changes, show cancellations (after one too many lengthy and beer-induced dead air episodes) and special benefit concerts?

Trying to reproduce this random subscription pattern has taxed my ipodder software - and transferred about 300 meg of lame programming to my hard drive. Thankfully, the pool of podcasts is still shallow enough that a tiptoe through Google is all it really takes - for now.

Is Prince Charles less aware of his environment than Chauncey Gardiner?

Mark Bolland, Prince Charles’ former deputy private secretary, seems to believe so, and has slammed Clarence House’s approach to media relations in the Guardian today:

“One of the Prince of Wales’s problems - and it’s a problem that’s unique to him in the royal family - is the extent to which he is remote from public opinion. He doesn’t read the newspapers, he doesn’t watch television news, and he doesn’t even really see letters that people write to him,” said Mr Bolland.

… this aloofness leaves Prince Charles isolated from the British people who may one day be his subjects: “I think it’s a strange position when you have an heir to the throne who you feel is more out of touch than his mother, who’s 20-odd years older.”

is a great T-shirt from Len and Knorah, the folks at the Jawbone podcast. Buy it here.

Not to toot my own horn, but there’s also a “I’m cooler than you. I listen to podcasts.” t-shirt.

BusinessWeek’s David Kiley is surprised that music acts - including rappers - would consider McDonald’s new campaign to integrate friendly commentary in their songs. Where has he been the last five (or fifty)years?

“… Maven executives say they have received numerous songs for consideration. McDonald’s gets final approval of song lyrics. Yipes!!! What happened to the anti-establishment rappers? Is it all about the money and nothing else now? Is this really the spirit of Tupac?…”

Tupac? Once your music hits the Billboard 100, I think you’re all about the money. And if you’re P. Diddy, you’re smart enough to start thinking about brand extensions - extensions that don’t involve an “upsizing with a coupon.”

Anyway - why should we be indignant about an industry that has long sold itself out in the name of filthy, horrible lucre? (to be lustfully muttered in a C. Montogmery Burns voice) After all, where was the uproar when Van Halen’s “Right Now” was used to promote the lame Crystal Pepsi?

I don’t know how that could have failed. “Can I get a rum and Crystal Pepsi?” “Hey Baby. Can I get you a Crystal Pepsi? “Watcha drinking? Ah, Crystal Pepsi.”

Yet another subjective column on blogging, this time in last week’s Hill Times. I was irritated enough that I penned this letter to the editor, published yesterday. (The Hill Times is a weekly aimed at the politicians, lobbyists and public servants working around Parliament.)

Re: “If blogging is the future of the 21st century journalism, it warrants closer investigation, let’s take a look,” by Tom Korski.

Web logs (or blogs), as Tom Korski observes, are often dedicated to recipes, personal notes and pictures of babies. Many are unedited, uninformed and unoriginal.

But blogs are not a flash in the pan. While the work of the inane and the irrelevant multiplies by the thousands daily, bloggers from around the world do produce quality analysis, reporting and commentary in countless specialist subjects.

Mr. Korski appears, as many do, to prefer his news and information filtered by editors and credentialled journalists. There is, however, a new generation of news consumers who have grown up choosing among television, print and online media. They view blogs as one more source of opinion or information, to be digested alongside traditional reporting and analysis.

In Canada and abroad, there are many insightful blogs - some penned by current or former journalists - that contribute to the political, social and economic dialogue. That includes David Akin and Paul Wells, whose work Mr. Korski highlighted selectively (and negatively) to buttress his argument.

To close - Mr. Korski makes the point that “web logs are an individual speaker’s corner in which anyone … can harangue on any subject.” The same could be said for, say, a newspaper column such as his.

Colin McKay
Ottawa, Ontario

It seems the All-Party Small Shops Group, a group of British MPs, suspects that further measures are needed to ensure all Britons have fair and competitive access to supermarket goods across the land.

Nothing like the scrutiny of an ombudsman and an MP’s group to keep the price of peas fair for all.

Says their Chair:

“We need an ombudsman so that people can refer complaints to them but also to take a broader view on supermarkets. The Department of Trade and Industry is adopting a hands-off approach with supermarkets, but we have regulators for all kinds of industries, so why not for this sector?

“While it need not be something heavy handed in the way that it has been with railways, people have got to have someone who can address their complaints if they are suffering as a result of unfair practices.” (Times of London)

Would you like to be the poor customer service rep in that sort of organization? Taking calls about coupon cashing policies, the lack of shopping carts at urban locations, and “why don’t they carry Tilson cheese at that shop on High Street?”

Call me a free market fanatic, but if unbearably small profit margins and growing price pressure from new formats are forcing consolidation in the supermarket industry, I would bet that greater regulation and oversight would not lessen the price of cheese strings or Ryvita crackers.

It would, however, open up another line of business for British communications shops - all those customer feedback forms for supermarkets across the country, inevitable trade show booths offering government customer service training videos, and an inane PSA campaign about the new rating system: “We stack the groceries, so you don’t have to.”

Sometimes, it’s the little touches that make an event magical. Like the 50 lb. three tier pork pie made for a West Yorkshire couple’s wedding.

Of course, the groom is a member of the Greater Ripponden Pork Pie Appreciation Society.

As more and more PR firms develop blogging “practices” and push blogging programs, I have to wonder: when we’re peddling the flavour of the month, are we taking into consideration the other entrees in the meal?

Are we pushing adoption of a tool that, while cool to communicators, does not fit well with our client’s existing communications strategy?

Are we taking the initiative to pitch them on an integrated communications strategy, including blogs, or just the new tool?

Even more importantly, are we pitching blogs as a cure-all, even though the technology may not be an appropriate channel to reach their customers, suppliers or stakeholders?

Ken Auletta has nary a negative word to say about Linda Kaplan Thaler in this week’s New Yorker.

A takeaway paragraph:

“In many ways, the advertising business in the early twenty-first century would be unrecognizable to the generation that once thrived on Madison Avenue. The traditional assumption, as Keith Reinhard says, was that advertisers chose the time and place of a “one-way show-and-tell” ad. The consumer was a captive audience.

Today, advertisers chase consumers with a certain air of desperation. “It’s not just about looking pretty anymore,” Linda Kaplan Thaler says. “There are all these beautiful products out there. You need a lot more personality to get the date.”

Thaler plans to expand her personal brand by hosting “a gentler version of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” for Oxygen, called “Making It Big.” Set to air in May, “she said that it would be great publicity for the agency— ‘like doing a new business pitch.’” Oxygen? That’s like playing in the Dominican League - there’s a lot of talent, but not a lot of spectators.

I don’t know which excerpt I like better from today’s NYT article on the snack bar in a Flatbush Sears:

“The cuisine, a sort of West-Indian-American fusion, is fresh, delicious and reasonably priced. The staff is friendly, and the décor is best described as Midcentury Employee Break Room.

Or that the place is called the Munchbox.

Turns out that Oprah can help a marketer move thousands of CPGs off the shelves, but may not be as useful in pushing poorly-regarded lumps of steel.

Her promotion of the Pontiac G6 - including giving away 276 of them to her audience - helped build buzz for the product last September. But sales haven’t followed suit.

Industry analysts, however, lay the blame on the design and capabilities of the car.

“… neither GM’s marketing department nor Winfrey can be blamed for the market performance of the G6.

“It’s one thing to have that kind of a major marketing coup, but you need to back it up,” said [Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research], who said he believes that the vehicle is an underwhelming package in a competitive marketplace.

In fact, Spinella said, GM’s marketing department should be credited with getting the lackluster G6 so much attention.”(Detroit Free Press)

Finally! The jury-rigging of online media monitoring may be coming to a close! Factiva is beta testing RSS feeds!

Sure - the feeds only provide industry-specific editor’s choices for now. And questions about authentication and redistribution will delay a simpler and more comprehensive version of Factiva RSS. But it’s a start!

As the FCC seizes upon inadvertent swear words and the White House Press Gallery whinges about their lack of access, it’s refreshing to be reminded of the madhouse that can be the British press.

The NYT’s London Bureau chief, Sarah Lyall, contributed an amusing commentary on the state of the British press to Slate last week. A sample:

“”What the fuck are you doing, you devious little turd?” is how [Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror] once opened a telephone conversation with Alastair Campbell, Blair’s chief spokesman and Machiavellian political attack dog.”

Oh - it looks like Campbell’s started a blog. And this is what he thinks of Piers Morgan.

Doonesbury pulled together a funny strip on outsourcing this past weekend - refreshing for its lack of fear-mongoring or cynicism.

Presidential cousin Billy Bush, candidate in 2008? It could happen. And Teddy Wayne has written his stump speech. It’s in McSweeney’s.

Is there an appropriate time to pull your company’s ads from a publication? How about an entire range of publications? Marks & Sparks has pulled all of its advertising from the UK’s Associated Newspapers stable - a relationship worth £2.9m last year - after an apparently inaccurate article in the Mail on Sunday.

While the story is two weeks old (Guardian, r.r.), PR Week UK is reporting on the reaction from the public relations and marketing communities.

Pulling advertising is, as a 1989 article in Communications World noted, incredibly stupid. Rather than winning a (suspect) moral victory, companies often end up distorting, if not sabotaging, their media plan and marketing efforts.

After all, how better to follow up a negative article than by pulling all your brand and product promotion - from the publications you personally identified as essential to your business plan?

You could do worse than watch some of the testimony on baseball and steroids taking place in Washington.

As we PR folks prepare our clients for public speaking opportunities, we often suggest they “just be themselves.” Relax! You’re presenting your point of view! You’re an expert in the field! You’ve got this nailed!

And then we emphasize bridging to key messages. Staying on track. Avoiding the knockdown punch.

Jose Canseco - whether you believe him or not - seems to have moved beyond this artifice. Michael Chabon, writing in an NYT Op/Ed, observed:

I’ve never seen a man who seems more comfortable with who he is than Jose Canseco. Not with who we think he is, like our current president, or with his best idea of himself, like our president’s predecessor, but with himself: charmer and snake, clown and thoroughbred.

That’s because he’s laid his entire identity on the line. And that was something Mark McGwire, lawyered up and seemingly concerned for the future, was not willing to do.

After 101 years, George Kennan has shuffled off this mortal coil. His “Long Telegram” and subsequent “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs helped define forty years of East-West relations, and were staples in my international relations courses.

The NYT has a lengthy biography of the man. (r.r.)

And here’s a quote from his Long Telegram to consider (not that it has any relevance today, nudge, nudge):

“[The Communist] Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward with great skill and persistence to a public often remarkably resistant in the stronghold of its innermost thoughts. But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power — party, secret police and Government — and it is exclusively with these that we have to deal.

A note to my younger readers: sixty years ago, the only way to get a message from Moscow to Washington in anything less than a week was by telegram, and you paid by the word. As a result, definite articles, adverbs and other useless verbiage was excised.

Hey! Imagine if blogs had to operate under the same conditions?

Jessica Helfand’s got a good riff on scrapbooking over at Design Observer.

What’s scrapbooking, you ask? Imagine your clippings book, but with a lot more pictures of small children and muffin recipes - and maybe some fabric and ribbon. And a hint of patchouli.

Political leanings aside, this is funny - and well designed. Muzzlegate.ca mocks the Conservative Party for their reluctance to address potentially divisive social issues during their policy convention this week. There’s even a cut-out “Mr. Muzzle.”

It’s the product of the Young Liberals of Canada, of course.

Thanks to David Akin for the pointer.

Some have pined in past months for the former influence and glory of a catalyst publication like Fast Company. Ten years ago, their pimping of ideas like change agents and brand you helped inspire and invigorate a generation of entrepreneurs and professionals.

Today, FC’s ad pages are way, way down. But the ideas and the ethos live on - there’s evidence in our everyday business that we’ve absorbed the “learnings” of the 1990s.

An example: a friend of mine was recently pitching for new business. Not a local pitch. Not a fellow Rotary member. Not even an acquaintaince of an old college friend. A serious municipal RFP with detailed requirements. The sort of thing that can cripple a one-man shop if not handled properly.

Now, Greg’s the kind of guy to have his material backed up on the laptop, spare CD, usb keychain and his Treo. He was prepared for this pitch. He had the marketing material sewn shut, the cover letter ironed, and the proposal polished. But he needed three pretty copies produced and shipped to the officious and demanding registrar by 11 am the next day. Oh - and he was travelling across the country on business.

The deadline was strict (Why 11am? Was there an office lunch buffet at Charlie Chan’s scheduled? Had people made plans to get loaded and copy their fannies on the office Xerox - in duplex?).

The only option in this two-bit town was a local copy shop. The sort of place that prides itself on its “next day service.” With the 1993-era computer that can’t handle “big attachments.”

Ten years ago, he would have hung up the payphone, turned on his heels, dejected, and headed for the closest peeler bar. Instead, he looked for a Kinko’s - the nearest was a mere 100 miles away, in a different state.

And the manager in Exurb, Indiana said he could do it. E-mailed files would become colour documents, copied, cerloxed, and packed for shipping.

A few months ago, I questioned the value of Kinko’s acquisition by FedEx. Less blinkered than me (and just a little motivated), Greg saw an opportunity: he harangued the manager to have an off-duty FedEx driver deliver his package to Ohio for the next morning. He even offered to transfer $200 the easiest way possible - through PayPal - to make sure the job was done.

End of story, right? A wonderfully modern tale of connectivity and hypersensitive customer service, right? Nope. Even better.

When Greg spoke to the manager again later that night, he was offered an even better option: FedEx Custom Critical. Same deadline, same driver, same documents - but twenty bucks cheaper and with an official FedEx delivery receipt.

That’s right. The late night manager at a copy shop a hundred miles away not only arranged production but shipping, and figured out how to save Greg money as well.

And the smalltown guy who didn’t upgrade his system to handle graphics files? Out of luck, but comfortable in his 1993 business model. I wonder how his other business - likely a video store - is holding up.

Lifted from Paul Kedrosky:

“The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

Whereas a public relations screw-up will live on forever in Factiva.

You should really take a look at Millward Brown’s international research into the sensory impressions imparted by brands. Are you speaking to ALL the senses of your consumer or client? Has your marketing team even considered the sense of smell, sound or touch in its planning process?

Come on - it’s not a joke. This is about more than just the new fresia body wash at Lush, the waterfall scent being peddled by your cleaning supplies wholesaler, or the latest in-store music channel. Are you overlooking an essential component when setting the stage for consumer interaction with your product?

Promotions and Incentives has reviewed this research and highlights some stunning results:

“…a whopping 42 per cent of consumers say McDonald’s smells like old oil. Even the sound is problematic. A large number of consumers felt the McDonald’s brand reminded them of screaming kids and, believe it or not, the beep-beep sounds of a truck backing up. These perceptions hardly augur well for the burger chain.”

In some cases, marketers are working to implement similar insights: machines are already being developed to deliver custom smells and sounds to customers in specific situations.

Now, if they could do something about your outside sales guy’s fondness for Drakkar Noir.

A provocative little quote from Paul Lavoie, Chairman/CCO of Taxi Advertising & Design:

“In Canada we don’t have brands. We don’t have consumer brands. We have business brands. We have Bombardier, Nortel, BlackBerry. We have branch offices, but not brands.” (from an interview with ihaveanidea)

What about Roots? Louis Garneau? President’s Choice products? Rocky Mountain bikes?

Okay, okay - it’s a pretty shallow wading pool of brands, and some Canadian consumer products have flared up and burned out - Kettle Creek Clothing Company, anyone?

Still, I really hate it when executives over-simplify in pursuit of the snappy quote.

When planning your communications activities, “don’t treat blogs like stepchildren” - that’s the best takeaway from a primer to blogging and wikis for catalogers in Direct magazine.

What sort of bonehead emails this to Phil Gomes:

“We just finished writing a [software] utility. I was wondering how much you would charge to slashdot us?”

Unbelievable.

Welcome to another government communicator who is carefully treading into the blogging world - Washington Flack.