How the NFL can help your brand “get drafted”

Preseason football doesn’t kick off until August, but the National Football League still managed to score big last Thursday. More than 25 million viewers tuned in to watch the first round of the NFL’s 77th annual Player Selection Meeting. More commonly known as the draft, this business meeting has become must-see TV for fans.

Even if you’re not counting down the days until football season, the draft offers several lessons for your brand.

1. Challenge corporate transparency norms.
Originally developed as an equitable way for teams to acquire top collegiate talent, the NFL draft is now a calendar event. The meeting could easily be conducted behind closed

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SXSW Interactive 2012 reevaluates business as usual

Change is inevitable, and nowhere is that more evident than in Austin, Texas, every March during the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. Born a music festival with 700 registrants in 1987, then branching out in 1994 with the addition of film and interactive tracks, SXSW (“South-by” to locals and show vets) has established itself as the preeminent launching pad for what’s new, different and loaded with potential for real impact on our culture.

What truly stood out at this year’s SXSW Interactive is the importance to embrace and experiment with the latest and greatest. Be it a new mobile application, a startup social media platform or a fundamental shift in how we plan our marketing efforts, proactively evaluating how these tools and theories impact business puts us in a position to lead. Because once they take off and hit critical mass, it’s a giant game of catch-up. And in an era when marketing and communications moves at an unprecedented speed, it’s more important than ever to think forward and be on the front lines of what’s happening now.

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Your SXSW Interactive halftime report

Bader Rutter is at SXSW Interactive 2012, and we’ve managed to best the rain and channel our inner Shawshank Redemption to attend three days of sessions. With two days left and the sun finally deciding to show up yesterday afternoon, here’s a halftime report with business takeaways from some standout sessions:

Attending the session “The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand”Agile Marketing
SXSW seems to be the birthplace of buzzwords, and agile marketing is the talk of marketers as the industry continues to think through ways to plan and reach audiences in the same way they consume content — in real time. The sold-out Marketing’s Shift from Waterfall to Agile focused on the premise that “marketing’s traditionally slow, phased, methodical approach to researching and reaching consumers doesn’t work anymore.” While an A-list panel of marketers representing big B2C brands all admitted they’re still figuring it out, one takeaway for any marketer to consider stood out:   

• Leave air in your plans and budgets: Shiv Singh from PepsiCo hit the room’s a-ha moment when he pointed out that while consumers digest content in real time, the marketers that communicate the content often have to plan on three to 12 months in advance. He highlighted that disconnect by pointing at SXSW Interactive itself, where session and speaker applications for one of the most real-time events in the world are due 11 months in advance of next year’s show. During the Q and A, I asked the panel how marketers go about “planning on not planning” and committing to a budget with a malleable idea behind it. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at Mindjet,

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Follow Bader Rutter for the latest from SXSW Interactive

The SXSW Interactive festival, an “incubator of cutting-edge technologies,” kicks off this afternoon. Yours truly will act as Bader Rutter’s embedded reporter, mining through the overwhelming amount of sessions and keynotes to relay key business takeaways and offer some marketing food for thought.

Starting this afternoon, follow @Bader_Rutter and @RickStoner for the latest from SXSW Interactive as I’ll be live-tweeting all weekend and through the festival’s wrapup on Tuesday. Also be on the lookout for blog posts on Converge, including a halftime report come Monday and a post-show recap. 

From emerging technologies to the latest in mobile, digital and social marketing trends, SXSW Interactive has developed a reputation for being the place to launch the digital marketing industry’s next big thing. Back in 2007, a small microblogging tool called Twitter had quite a show. So who knows what we’re in store for this year? Wednesday’s new iPad release already has nerds such as myself eager to get to Austin and get a sneak

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Playing in the Super Bowl? Don’t lose your head.

This is the obligatory blog post where someone talks about the commercials played during the recently concluded Super Bowl.

It’s obligatory because everything connected with the Super Bowl has an obligation to make a big spectacle that gets talked about. Somewhere along the way, that spectacle spread to the advertising that fills the breaks in the action, and we haven’t looked back since. Today, Super Bowl commercials are dissected just as much as — if not more than — the game itself.

And, in recent years, the advertising has mirrored the actual game in that 97 percent of it is boring and underwhelming.

How did we get to this point? In much the same way the losing team (this year, the New England Patriots) ends up with its celebratory shirts in third-world countries — by getting caught up in the hoopla of the Big Game and forgetting to do all the things that got them there in the first place.

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Things that should NOT go without saying in social media: Common sense and preparation

“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”
— John Wooden

Leave it to a basketball coach to stress the importance of planning.

Colleen Grams, a group leader in our PR department, recently wrote a post about the social media failures that have been bombarding our news feeds lately. The common ingredients in each blunder were a jarring lack of both common sense and advance preparation. Here are two quick tips to give businesses active in social media some important points of self-reflection:

1. Issues management is job No. 1 and a 24/7 responsibility.
Who gets the call when a social media issue arises? Who are the key stakeholders that need to be in the know and voice input on the decision-making process? If you can’t reference a decision tree or social media policy that quickly answers these questions, your

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Marcom A to Z ─ W for Work

I read Steve Jobs’ obituary this morning. The world should feel a little smaller today ─ less innovative ─ without him. And yet the legacy he built throughout his career, and his life, fills any void that might exist.

The article chronicled his life by milestones, work setbacks, and accomplishments. It got me thinking: We spend a quarter of our life (often more) working. Doing what? A task? Checking a mandatory box defined by someone else? Hopefully not. That’s the prerequisite only if

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Social media revolution in Egypt, literally

Last week, Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president of Egypt after hundreds of thousands had protested throughout Egypt for more than two weeks.

During that time, social media received significant attention around those protests and it is another indicator of the power and speed messages travel in social channels. For good and bad.

Kenneth Cole and Google are two brands that have social stories stemming from this event and it is interesting to see the implications unfold.

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Branding is nuts

I recently read the Forbes article “Comeback Brands of 2011” which lists 10 well-known consumer brands poised for a comeback this year. These brands never went away; they just lost the public eye. Why? All brands struggle to stay fresh; if they can’t they are in trouble. The comeback brands—including Chevrolet, Levi’s, Pert, and Planters Peanuts—failed to maintain a dialogue with their audiences, they failed to keep the conversation going. That’s why they need to make a comeback.    

What unites them is their effort to tap into nostalgia branding. When we reflect on our past, we tend to have warm memories and positive associations. Our attitudes toward brands are no different. All of the brands featured in the article have long histories and hope to evoke their past brand equity while making it relevant for today. The result aims to reconnect with older audiences while attracting new ones. 

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Teach the world to sing…about your product or service

Forty years ago this month, an idea blossomed into a television commercial jingle that would capture an important era in history and help define a generation.
 
Written in January 1971 in less than 24 hours for a Coca-Cola radio spot, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” was originally sung by The New Seekers. Later that year, Coca-Cola brought the song to life in a television commercial filmed on an Italian hillside with a diverse crowd of 500 extras. After hitting the airwaves, the jingle became so popular that a full-length version of the song was quickly produced, renamed, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” The tune quickly climbed the charts to become a No. 1 hit single. Another group, The Hillside Singers, released a second recording of the song. In one year, both groups sold a combined 1 million records of the song.

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BBN International Branding Conference

It began in the midst of a major sandstorm blanketing Cairo in grit from the desert, and it ended two days later with a chilly evening cruise down the Nile in unseasonably cool temperatures. But in between, an audience of business leaders, marketing professionals and journalists warmly embraced the second International Branding Conference hosted December 13 to 14 by The Business Branding Network (BBN) Egypt.

Conference participants were keen to explore best practices that could be applied to global brand development and destination marketing. We had top names from Egyptian companies and universities at the podium. We had featured BBN speakers presenting examples and perspectives from different nations (I was there for BBN USA). And we had a forum that devoted extensive time to open discussion, challenging questions and even debate among all participants. Nobody mailed this one in – there was engagement and energy throughout.

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Life with Sina

Sina is an extremely bright, beautiful woman of 25 from Germany. She came to Bader Rutter as a part of the Business Branding Network’s Rising Star program from our sister agency wob. BBN is a network of 25 agencies located all over the world. Sina’s focus is Brand Asset Management, which is the internationally vetted branding process used at  all our sister BBN agencies that allows us to work seamlessly together amongst different cultures providing truly global integrated services. While I know that this multi-cultural business interaction takes place at our agency everyday, it was particularly eye-opening for me to see it first hand through Sina.

Sina came to BR at the end of August and left at the end of October. As with other interns who have come to Bader Rutter in years past through BBN, Sina lived with my family and me. She was in some ways another child, but more so a friend to my daughter Nicki and me.

Doing basic daily things became fun with Sina. Going to the grocery store was particularly fun and interesting. She was like a child in toy store. Her eyes would get big over the number of cereal and yogurt selections and at the size of bottles available in everything from shampoo to ketchup. When it was time to do the laundry or empty the dishwasher, she’d jump up to help making the chore easier, faster and more fun to do.

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Finding a brand identity through social media

Photo credit: okgo.netIt seems hard to believe now, but there was once a time when music videos dominated MTV programming. It’s true. Unfortunately those days are now far gone, and this development has left many musical artists grasping at straws over how to share their music with the world while showcasing their creativity. The Chicago-raised and Los Angeles-based band OK Go has been one of the few groups to display the foresight and social media savviness necessary to sidestep the pothole that has derailed other bands.

In my nearly 29 years on this planet, I have rarely seen an OK Go video on television or heard an OK Go song on the radio. That hasn’t stopped the band from developing a strong cult following, thanks in large part to its ahead-of-the-times utilization of YouTube.

OK Go made its first major splash in 2006 when it unleashed “Here It Goes Again” on the digital world. This video came during a time when YouTube was used primarily by pet owners looking to show off their cat’s inability to escape a paper bag. It would proceed to win a Grammy for “Best Short-Film Music Video” and the 2006 YouTube Award in the Most Creative category. The video, to this day, remains one of the top 50 most-watched videos in YouTube history.

OK Go realized the power of social mediums like YouTube far before any other bands, and used that power to share its music and build its brand. In some ways, OK Go pioneered the use of the phrase, “going viral.” The band was once a little-known independent outfit that gained widespread notoriety in quick fashion through the Internet and social media. It’s viral marketing at its finest.

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Navigating brand confusion when tradition is involved

What an organization wants people to remember about its brand and what actually gets remembered is not always the same thing.

That’s an important thing to think about when branding. I learned this lesson first hand while serving as the 62nd Alice in Dairyland. While Alice is associated with the state of Wisconsin and its vast agricultural industries, it is a brand all its own that’s struggled with brand confusion because of a signature headpiece worn by Alice – a tiara.

The use of the tiara can lead to brand confusion because of common misconceptions. People often assume Alice is a beauty queen or princess, rather than the ambassador that she is. What’s more, the focus can shift from the importance of agriculture to the shiny object on Alice’s head. For example, I often left the tiara behind when I was visiting classrooms in an effort to limit confusion.

Despite the misconceptions, the tiara also has several benefits.

• Recognizable in a crowd - Creates interest, draws attention and increases the opportunity for communication

• Representative of Wisconsin - Tiara worn by Alice to represent all Wisconsin agriculture and designed by Wisconsin Jewelers Association with gemstones indigenous to the state, amethyst and citrines

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The power of a brand

I drive a great car to work everyday. It’s not a flashy new car. In fact, it’s 20 years old and currently has over 340,000 thousand miles on the odometer.

It’s slightly battered and bruised. But I don’t think people feel sorry for me having to drive it. Because you see… it’s a ‘Lexus.’ An old one to be sure but I think it’s just getting broken in.

I’ve never had to touch the engine or transmission. It’s a model from the first year Toyota introduced the new Lexus luxury brand to the world. Yes it is old, and sure, its value rests somewhere between a new self-propelled lawnmower from Home Depot and a 10,000 BTU window air conditioner from Sears, but it is still a ‘Lexus’. That’s why people will never feel badly for me cruising down the highway in it. That might not be the case if I was in an old Ford Pinto, AMC Matador or even a late model Pontiac Aztek (I just had to include this modern day classic on the list) people may wonder about me. But they don’t.

That’s the power of a brand. The Lexus brand.

The relentless pursuit of perfection.

The carefully crafted image of the new Lexus brand began back in 1989 with a series of outstanding product demonstration television commercials on the LS400.

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