Great Flash Ad for Classico Sauce

99 times out of 10 I ignore banner ads (except for those placed by people advertising on sites that I manage, of course!).

I was on the National Review blog site this morning and came across a Flash ad for Classico spaghetti sauce that prompts you to mouseover to mix your ideal pizza sauce.

Visually, it’s very simple. You have an empty jar and a scrolling list of ingredient icons such as garlic, tomato, basil, spinach, etc. You drag your preferred ingredients to the empty jar, click a link to mix it up and – the result is a recomendation for which Classico sauce you might enjoy.

The technology to do this isn’t anything special. The presentation probably isn’t going to win awards. Quite frankly, that simplicity is why I think it was effective. If I made my own sauce (which I do), what would I use? Given that information, what Classico sauce is close to my preference? It’s all about the product and, to some extent, the cooking experience.

Now to the most important question – will I buy?

I’d say yes. The ad clicks through to a site offering Classico coupons and recipies. While I am in theory a sauce snob who prefers to make my own, I’m a sauce snot who is often pressed for time and has to feed three kids as well. I’ve used Classico in the past – not bad. I grabbed a few coupons and will try out the sauce the ad recommended.

Nice job Classico, and whomever their ad agency was for the campaign.

Using Twitter Promotions to Engage Customers & Members

Can Twitter put butts in seats at an event without having to market through email?

That’s a vital question for many organizations as email’s effectiveness continues to dwindle. To be sure, email is still important and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it, but it’s nowhere near as effective as it once was. People are shifting communications to venues where they have more control – mobile text, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I’ve run several informal programs over Twitter in the past year that worked well to accomplish some limited marketing goals. Today, I’m launching a more formal Twitter-based campaign at www.twengaged.com.

The campaign will drive registration to a Chicago AMA resume writing workshop that we’re hosting in partnership with Lynn Hazan – midwest marketing recruiter extraordinaire.

The idea is to get an organization’s membership based enaged through a fun promotion. Engaged + Twitte r= Twengaged.

The pilot campaign is with the Chicago AMA, and if it works it can be run for any number of organizations.

With this one, people will Tweet their resume’s Objective Statement  - the one-sentence summary at the start of a resume – with a designated set of hashtags. Participants can then vote (thumbs up / thumbs down) and the top vote getters get the glory of a leader board position.

At the end of the promotion, a team of judges will decide on a winner - who receives a free ticket to the Chicago AMA resume writing workshop on July 28.

The idea is to leverage the viral nature of Twitter with the self-interest of participants. If I post my objective statement, I want two things:

1. As many people as possible should see my Objective Statement, which will help me find job opportunities.
2. I want to win the free ticket.

 Therefore, participants have every incentive to spread the word about the promotion and we should enjoy viral growth in a short period of time.

Very exciting!

 

Wh

Charity as a Marketing Program

I spent the weekend working out what I think is going to be a very effective marketing program for a music venue in Michigan. Their goals are straightforward:

1. 1. Butts in seats
2. 2. develop an opt-in platform for the future.

The promotion will tie into an upcoming concert and will use Twitter, PR and traditional marketing outlets to encourage the public to donate a large volume of small donations to a cause – preferably something local. Mobile text can be used to collect donations, and Twitter’s API allows for collections through applications like TipJoy. Rather than big donors, the focus is on spreading a message virally to collect $1 here, $5 there.

I have high hopes that it will not only raise significant money for the cause, but it seems like it has all the elements in place to go viral pretty quickly.

Let’s hope the client sees it too.

Fundraising on Twitter

Came across an interesting opportunity to help the American Cancer Society tap into the power of Twitter networks to ramp up fundraising at events.

Events now can have several hundred people to raise money, but the footprint doesn’t extend far beyond that. Twitter and its viral nature, can magnify that audience to thousands very quickly.

Also came across several applications that support online micropayments for donations. One in particular, Tipjoy, looks like it was originally created for blogging, but has really promising applications for charities. By bundling donations, it enables donations as small as $1 without losing it all in processing fees. Basically, Tipjoy takes 3% off the top and the charity keeps the rest.

Video marketing – add that to the list

In a bit of Sunday evening goofiness I cut a video promo for Chicago AMA’s Brandsmart conference on June 18.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=josbLeY5shM&feature=channel_page

It was an interesting experience. First, the details really matter. From comments I heard the other week at Ragan’s Unconference (reg. the Domino’s Pizza video), I knew I had to keep it to 30 seconds or less. I wanted to get the factual info out, but make it fun and memorable with the help of the ridiculously cute puppy, Olivia.

I also learned about the difference between AVI and MP4. AVI is a raw footage format that uses an enormous volume of memory. The 36 second video used 250MB of memory and on my first upload attempts, it took more than an hour, and played out of sync.

I finally found a very easy to use freeware program called Prism Video Converter that let me convert from AVI to MP4. That made a huge difference (5mb) without losing much quality. Thumbs up to that program. Many of the other freeware programs’ trial versions were useless. They only converted half of the video, or put a flashing red “watermark” in the middle of it. Prism has a paid version with more editing tools. If I go more into video, which is likely, they now have the inside track.

Distribution-wise, I went full bore. Posted it to Chicago AMA’s LinkedIn group and Facebook page. I also sent it to contacts in Facebook (and finally sorted my Facebook friends into business and non-business). At the moment, several friends are re-Tweeting it on Twitter, so we’ll see how far it goes.

Accountants don’t know what they’re missing. Who else has this much fun at work?

Kudos to AT&T Mobile for service

This isn’t earth shattering, but I recently renewed the contract on my family’s mobile phones with AT&T.

Part of that process, of course, was filling out and mailing in all the rebate forms on the phones.

AT&T just sent me a text message saying that they’d received the documents and were processing the check.

Nicely done, AT&T.

Green marketing campaign that even worked on me

Generally speaking, I’m pretty skeptical of all the green marketing efforts. They may say that switching to electronic billing saves trees, baby seals and three-legged salamanders, but the fact is that they’re just trying to reduce their printing and postage costs. If I was saving them money, they should share some of that with me in the form of a discount.

Over the weekend, I received a postcard from AT&T wireless that was so cool, I went ahead and switched to paperless billing as a reward for their creative thinking.

The post card – probably timed for Earth Day stuff – had the normal blahblah about saving trees. This card, however, also had wildflower seeds embedded in the paper. Not only was I being asked to switch to paperless billing to save the world. I was being asked to recycle the postcard itself and turn it into fertilizer for wildflowers.

I am now on paperless billing with AT&T, and my kids are eagerly awaiting the wildflowers.

Of course, if the wildflowers don’t grow …

Successful, spontaneous Tweet Up

Spent the weekend at the American Marketing Association Leadership Summit. This is a training program for the chapter officers – part inspiration, part training. I’ve been to this before from the IH perspective and the experience was entirely different. Before, it was a chore. This was inspirational. Awesome.

Just for giggles, at a cocktail reception on the first night, George Couris (Chicago AMA President) and I started goofing around with ideas to set Chicago AMA apart at the conference. We worked it out over the dinner and keynote portion of the evening and launched the first Chicago AMA TweetUp, and the results were great.

A few lessons before I describe what we did and how it worked. First, it took 45 minutes to come up with a successful, Twitter-based marketing program. It was creative. It was fun.

It was a glorious mess of improvization the entire way through.

We launched the program without having an event destination in mind, and in fact it was 5pm on Saturday before I’d even settled on the methodology to get followers to the event.

The goal: Get a significant number of attendees to a “secret” event on Saturday night by promoting it virally through Twitter. Can we pull it off in just one day?

The tools: First, the #chiama hashtag – which we’d invented about two weeks before at a Chicago AMA board meeting. We had five or six people from the chapter at the event that night, a total of four available during the day Saturday, and only me for the evening because everyone else already had plans.

The program: A Wine Tasting at Vintner’s Cellar Winery  presented as a treasure hunt. We’d spend the day on Saturday building an audience through teasers. Something was coming. It was going to be cool. That’s all they knew. (That’s because that’s all we knew too.)

By the cocktail reception at 5:45, we said we’d start dropping hints and directions to the event.

The Results: Out of an event that had maybe 300-400 people show up, we had a TweetUp with 35 attendees.

We got 10% of a conference to show up to an event that we pulled out of our asses 24 hours before.

Analysis: Wow. The biggest key to this was to rapidly recruit influential ambassadors. Of those on the Twitter feed, the most effective was @marybethonline. She has begun Tweeting with the #amasummit hashtag and we started promoting and using both hashtags. That expanded our audience greatly.

It grew virally from there. As the day progressed, more and more people already knew about it. Some would mention it to me first – “hey, you’re the Twitter guy! Where are we going?” People were posting to the #chiama Twitter stream with questions, promotions. They were reTweeting it.  

When I first encountered Twitter six months ago, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been slow getting it, but I’m starting to see this platform’s enormous potential.

I’ll never be bored at a conference again!

Live Twittering my first event

I’m at a Chicago AMA event at the moment – Marketing to Small Business in a Slumping Economy – and I thought I’d Twitter some of the insights as we go. Interesting to see what results from that.

In theory, people who follow me should retweet some of my comments and this should yield a new batch of followers. The live Tweeting during my Marketing in Action event yielded 20 new followers – presumably from people at the event. This might go further.

[Update] About an hour and a half in, I’ve picked up seven new followers by Twittering insights from the speakers. The second speaker isn’t as useful, so I’m not getting as many Tweets out.

BlitzTime – interesting concept but …

Just tried out a relatively new virtual networking site called Blitz Time (http://www.blitztime.com/). The idea is to replicate the good parts of real-world networking events and eliminate the bad parts. The concept is great, but like all of these things it depends heavily on the people who participate.

Real life networking events have costs. Sometimes that’s a cash cost, but it’s certainly a time and travel expense cost. With a good crowd, that cost is covered by making connections with new people. However, the “good crowd” is dependent on luck. If the right people are there and if you happen to introduce yourself to them – good networking. If either of those doesn’t happen – waste of time.

I’ve tried several methods with Chicago AMA events to set up some form of pre-networking – some way to know who will be there in order to make sure to meet the right people. There hasn’t been much participation. A big part of that is execution – you need to focus on the event mechanics before having time for the fancy stuff – but the fact is it hasn’t worked well yet.

For BlitzTime, you sign up for an event and go through the attendee list to indicate whether you’d like to meet a person, or not. The event itself lasts an hour, with about 10 minutes of introduction followed by “blitzes”. These are 6 minute conversation segments on the phone where you can interact with another participant. If you make a connection, it can lead to new business or opportunities. If not, the conversation is (mercifully) over in six minutes and you see what happens with the next person.

The group on this call was pretty small (seven, I think) so I wouldn’t say the results were great. With a bigger group I think it would work out better.

I’ve scheduled a call with co-founder Jeff  D’Urso to dig into the idea more and see if we might run an experiment with Chicago AMA.