Late on the afternoon of March 9, an Examiner.com article criticized a new campaign Kimberly-Clark had started airing for Huggies diapers. The campaign depicted fathers as bumbling, clueless klutzes right out of a 1950s sitcom, and a massive online backlash from dads — 32% of whom are their kids’ primary caregivers — got K-C to pull the first commercial from the air and start hurriedly revising the others in the campaign.

Surprising reaction

Reaction to the article was, to put it frankly, astounding.

First, because there was so much of it: over 6,000 page views as of midnight, March 12; 222 Facebook likes and just about 100 comments and replies to comments — mostly from women.

And second, because virtually all the women, with only three exceptions, sided with the angry dads.

Blowback

One woman blowing back against the campaign was Lecia Hale, who wrote, “Sexism works against both sexes… This story makes me proud of our modern dads! Let’s move away from silly stereotypes. They’re not amusing because they’re not true.”

Chloe Williams Hincman went a step further. Read the rest of this entry »

"Watch my two-minute commercial, fool!"

In the beginning was the 2011 two-minute Chrysler Super Bowl commercial, in which Eminem’s voice-over said you should buy Chrysler cars because they come from the imploding, dysfunctional city of Detroit.

This year, in another Chrysler Super Bowl commercial,  Clint Eastwood went on for another two minutes about how Detroit — which an Economist article characterized as flirting with financial disaster — was a model for “America at halftime.”

And now, it seems, everyone’s getting into the act.

Of course, there’s nothing new about two-minute commercials. In the middle of the night, insomniacs see direct-response pitches and infomercials all the time. But now they’re starting to invade prime-time television.

In this year’s Grammy Awards telecast, Chipotle ran a two-and-a-half minute Luddite homage to the good old days of pre-Agricultural Revolution, Malthusian subsistence farming.

Chevrolet is running a two-minute version of its “Happy Grad” :30 online.

Old Navy just released a two-minute spot for a new line of t-shirts starring Mr. T (Get it?) on E! network’s “Talk Soup” and “Chelsea Lady.” The commercial features online couponing to get one of these t-shirts for free, which begs the question: If the shirts are so great, why do you need advertising to give away — not sell, but give away for free — a few tens of thousands of them? Read the rest of this entry »

With inept-father stereotyping, Huggies put its foot into what their diapers are full of.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Kimberly-Clark wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their Huggies diapers on television, and to do this they chose a stereotype right out of 1950s situation comedies.

They wanted to show how well their diapers did their job under even the worst possible conitions. And what conditions could be worse than putting them in the hands of the most hapless, clueless, inept adults known to American folklore — fathers?

The “Dad Test”

The Huggies “Dad Test” campaign filmed five babies left alone in the same house with their fathers for five days, on the premise that if Huggies could survive five days with these bumbling boobs, they could survive anything.

“To prove that Huggies diapers and wipes can handle anything,” the female voice-over begins, “we put them to the toughest test imaginable — Dads.”

In other words, as a consumerist.com headline put it, Huggies diapers are so good, even dads can’t use them wrong.

The poop storm

Dads across the country were not amused. They had good reason not to be.

It turns our that 32% of fathers are their children’s primary caregivers. And most of the other 68% pitch in with child care — at least to the extent of knowing how and when to, uh, change a diaper. Read the rest of this entry »

Reaching your target audience takes more than low cost per thousand.

The first goal of any media planner is to make the most efficient media buy. This means the one that reaches the largest number of consumers — preferably the largest number of qualified prospects — at the lowest cost. But you can seriously undermine your brand’s sales efforts by basing everything on the numbers alone.

That’s because efficiency — the lowest cost per thousand — is no guarantee of effectiveness — getting those thousands of consumers to buy.

It turns out that some of the most efficient media are the least effective, and vice versa.

Efficient but not effective

Direct mail, for example, has long been regarded as one of the most efficient media ever. With it, you can target your audience not only geographically, but also demographically, psychographically and behaviorally as well.

In using direct mail for a West Virginia solar panel installer, our company was able to specify affluent neighborhoods, upper incomes and home values, memberships in green-cause organizations, subscriptions to Audubon and other eco-friendly magazines, and Democratic registration. The result was a 10% response rate and a 40% spike in web traffic for the client.

That response rate was an exception. Historically, direct mail response averages 1.3%. For e-mail blasts targeted with equal efficiency, it’s 1.6%. And for targeted online display ads, a clickthrough rate of 0.5% is phenomenal. Read the rest of this entry »

GM should've listened to Lincoln.

“You are entitled to your own opinion,” the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

The Chevrolet Division of Government Motors begs to differ — and is getting slammed in the marketplace as a result.

Hot on the heels of their latest misleading commercial for their worst-selling model — a Volt spot ironically titled “Just the Facts” — comes an Edmunds estimate of February domestic car sales and car sales over the past 12 months. And guess which manufacturer is taking it on the chin.

A loser in a sea of winners

With a seasonally adjusted rate of 14.4 million units February to February, the auto industry had a banner year. With nearly 1.1 million units sold in February, car makers had a banner month.

All except one, that is.

Ford’s adjusted 12-month sales are up 13.6% and Chrysler’s a whopping 27.2%, but GM’s are down 8.8%. That’s a 36% spread. For the month just ending, Edmunds sees Ford up 18%, Chrysler up 32.5% and GM down 5%.

Bad advertising loses sales

While you can attribute those results to many things, GM’s advertising has to be one of them.

Commercials for GM’s largest nameplate have actually created sales for competitors, according to a Kelly Blue book analyst. Read the rest of this entry »

Hubris is a lousy business model

Apple just announced it’s slashing the annual minimum commitment for advertising on its iAd mobile ad system. Again.

Now a mere $100,000 annual commitment lets advertisers run campaigns in iPhone and iPad applications. While that’s a fortune to local Richmond advertisers, it’s a pittance compared to what Apple was originally charging.

When Steve Jobs unveiled iAd in 2010, its minimum requirement was a cool $1 million a year. Last year, that dropped to $500,000 and later to $300,000. Today, it’s just a tenth of its former self.

Moreover, they’re giving application developers a larger cut of ad revenues from their apps — 70% instead of 60% before. And instead of charging advertisers twice — once per 1,000 ad impressions and again for each click — they’ll now just charge the cost-per-thousand rate.

iAd’s comedown is part of a bigger Apple pattern, right out of Greek tragedy.

Hubris begets nemesis

In the classic Greek tragedies, the hero’s hubris — extreme haughtiness, arrogance or pride — always provoked nemesis, a poetic-justice-like form of revenge. And hubris is the perfect word to describe the Jobs style.

When introducing the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs chose to keep its architecture closed to software developers, so that Apple could wring not only hardware money, Read the rest of this entry »

Make sure your competitive advertising doesn't hit you in the head.

There are times when your best pitch can boomerang. A few minutes before 7 PM on Super Bowl Sunday was one of them.

That’s when a commercial for Chevrolet’s Silverado pickup truck aired to a record audience of an estimated 111.5 million people.

The spot was set in the aftermath of the world apocalypse that a Mayan calendar predicted for this year and depicts the Silverado as one of only two manufactured artifacts durable enough to withstand the cataclysm (the other being Twinkies).

In it a Silverado turns on its lights and drives through a landscape so devastated, it resembles downtown Detroit (the city that the Clint Eastwood Chrysler spot said was the model for “America’s second half”) to a meeting of about a half-dozen Silverado owners.

Here’s where the boomerang starts

“Where’s Dave?” asks one of them.

“Dave didn’t drive the longest-lasting, most dependable truck on the road,” another conversationally replies, “Dave drove a Ford.”

A funny thing happened on the way to the showroom

That little zinger drove tons of pickup buyers to the showroom, all right — but not quite the one Chevy had in mind.

According to a statement just released by Ashkay Anand, a Kelly Blue Book marketing-intelligence web analyst, the commercial produced an immediate decline in interest in the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and a massive surge of hits for the Ford F-150.

Compared with the previous Sunday, January 29, Silverado’s share of traffic to the KBB website dropped 25%, Read the rest of this entry »

How everyone except Government Motors sees the Chevy Volt

Imagine you’re Joel Ewanick, GM’s global marketing chief, and you’ve got a problem.

You have a subcompact car that, even with a $7,500 government subsidy, sells for the price of a luxury sedan.

It has severly limited range. According to your own company’s director of electric vehicles and batteries, it would take four weeks to drive this subcompact from Detroit to Florida. Which, he admits, is one whole week longer than it would’ve taken to make the trip by bike.

Its sales target for last year was less than 1% of your best selling model’s, but it missed even that unambitious goal by 24%.

Your dealerships from New York to California are refusing deliveries.

Oh, and the car’s best known for catching fire.

So what do you do? Read the rest of this entry »

Running out the clock?

Advertisers are going all-out with a startlingly innovative new game plan this year. They’re going long. With their commercials, that is.

Volkswagen will be airing a 60-second spot. So will their sister brand, Audi. Hyundai’s running a :60 just before the kickoff, on the assumption that that’s when they’ll have more of viewers’ undivided attention. (Of course, the fact that they’ll be paying only $200,000 to $4 million just before the game instead of around $6+ million during it may have had something to do with it.)

And a 45-second PepsiMax commercial is rumored to be in production.

Isolated phenomenon or trend?

Kantar Media, which tracks television ad buys, notes that November, 2011 — the most recent month for which they’ve compiled statistics — saw an increase in 60-second commercial buys and a corresponding decrease in :30s.

But Super Bowl ad plans and buys are made months before then. So what gives? Why are advertisers coughing up twice as much as the $3.5-million-per-30-seconds rate? To say nothing of hundreds of thousands more in production costs? Especially since, the mini-trend that Kantar’s statistics imply Read the rest of this entry »

At least somebody got it right.

Quick Response [QR] codes — those bar-code-like things you see on everything from rental cars to Bratz dolls, should be a marketer’s dream.

Since the early days of direct-order coupon ads in the early 20th Century, advertisers have known that the simpler the response mechanism, the higher the response — and what can be simpler than pointing your smart phone, scanning and clicking?

QR codes make every advertising medium instant direct-response — everything from the Times Dispatch to the packaging at Wal-Mart, Martin’s or Kroger to the billboards along I-64.

Enterprise Rent A Car pastes QR codes on the left front windows and attaches them to the keyrings of 1 million North American rental vehicles so that passers-by and drivers who are so inclined can get information from the  car’s manufacturer. JC Penney has gone hog-wild with QR codes, including holiday gift tags that let the recipient hear a recorded message from the giver. Some funeral homes even sell tombstones with QR codes that link to an obituary of the dearly departed.

QR codes connect target audiences with the instant gratification of a sales message, video, or e-commerce portal. This means that retailers can increase productivity by serving more customers with fewer salespeople.

Best of all, they’re precisely measurable, and if there’s one thing marketers love, it’s metrics. Read the rest of this entry »