So we decided to have a little fun while trying to explain exactly what it is we do… in less than a minute. Whew.
Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
KJA clears a path to advertisers
May 13, 2011Interactive TV changes the channel
April 12, 2011Ever heard of interactive TV? We’re not talking about channel surfing or yelling at the guys in black and white stripes during the ball game. It’s more along the lines of on-demand. As a TV hungry population, we’ve grown to love our DVR, on-demand episodes and streaming movies. (It’s all SO much easier than the blinking clock on that VCR.)
Advertisers take note: Now there are ways for you to interact and exchange information with viewers too.
Currently Comcast offers a number of ways to connect companies with their television audience. Two of these – Telescoping and Request for Information – work to create deeper, more efficient engagements with potential customers.
Telescoping gives viewers the opportunity for instant in-depth information. A small box overlays at the bottom of a :30 or :60 commercial, asking, for example, “Would you like to view a Subaru test drive?” With the press of a remote button, the viewer is directly linked to branded on-demand content, in this case, a Subaru test drive. Not only does it expand the amount of information available at the consumer’s finger tips, it’s easily tracked. Comcast provides information daily on how many times the video was viewed and how many minutes of it were watched.
The Request for Information (RFI) uses the same basic tool – a box overlaid at the bottom of a standard commercial. This interactive prompt allows viewers to accept coupons, enter sweepstakes, take advantage of product offers, or request more information by pressing a remote button. By choosing to participate, viewers agree to share contact information with the advertiser. This means better efficiency with marketing materials – only those requesting materials receive them.
TV viewing is moving from a single channel, passive experience to two-way channel, interactive one, much like the web evolved with Web 2.0. In fact, Manish Bhatia, President of Advanced Digital Services at The Nielson Company compares it to the web. “A lot of what exists on the internet today, is what is looking to be available on the television screen 3 to 5 years from now.”
How much could your advertising efforts improve with interaction? Are you taking advantage of that interaction on the web?
3 parts of your branding pie
May 27, 2010We talk quite a bit about social media, building social communities and maximizing these popular avenues for connecting with your customers. It’s an integral element in the brand pie. But (and there’s always a “but”) – it’s not the only element. By itself, your Facebook page doesn’t create a bond with your customers – it reinforces that bond.
Carrying that pie analogy further – consider your brand pie’s basic parts:
- Traditional marketing (crust)
- Customer experience/interaction (filling)
- Social media (creamy topping)
These parts intermingle and depend on one another to provide an impressive “complete bite.”
Traditional marketing
Mediums like print, broadcast, outdoor allow for creative that connects with people on an emotional level. Here you’re able to tell a flavor-filled branding story which consumers take in, react to and relate with.
Customer experience
This sets you apart from the bland competition. You must provide interactions that make people want to come back for seconds and thirds. As we’ve said before, your brand is built at every point of contact. But it centers around experience. Each encounter with your waitstaff, customer service, technicians, salespeople, delivery drivers, hostesses should make a customer feel linked with your brand. Remember: It takes a costly dose of marketing and social media to overcome bitter experiences.
Social media
The reinforcer. You prepared an identifiable base with your marketing story. You served up a fulfilling customer experience – the kind of encounter that makes them want more. With this foundation, now you’re ready to top it off with a sweet two-way street of communication. Social media now has meaning and relevance. The amount followers or fans isn’t nearly as important as the amount of love and loyalty they feel to you.
Yes this is the era of social media. But remember it’s just one ingredient in the whole pie. Without the other ingredients, all that remains is fluff.
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Post to Facebook Were there ads during the game?
February 8, 2010-
Michelle Corley : KJA Designer & Thinker
- For years now the Super Bowl, for many of us, has been more about the pull-out-the-stops commercials than the action on the gridiron. What will the Clydesdales do this year? How much more sex will Go Daddy use to sell websites? Will the office linebacker hit again?
That all came to a festive halt for Super Bowl 44. Eyeballs were glued to the passes and runs – and that one game-changing interception. This morning, Super Bowl 44 is about the onside kick, a 2-point conversion, and confetti being caught by an MVP daddy and his son. The talk – rather chanting – is “Who dat!” and “MVP” and “Thank you Breesus!”
Were there actual commercials during the game? Sure.
For me, three stood out. Everything else became a mishmash of Danica, Oprah, Chevy and Mike Ditka.
- Snickers: What’s not to love about Betty White? I thought it was laugh-out-loud funny…and the tag line “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry” – worked perfectly with the scenario.
- Doritos: The bark collar on the dog – the dog smarter than the dirt-bag dude. What’s not the love?
- Dodge Charger: The promises – hilarious. “I will listen to your friend’s opinions of my friends.” “I will watch your vampire TV shows with you.” “I will carry your lip balm.” They certainly spoke directly to their demographic (because lets face it, the Charger is one hot boy-toy muscle car). Man’s last stand.
The USA Today Ad Meter tracks the ads live as they run with a panel of folks. Seems I was in line with the panel on #1 and #2. They picked the Bud Light spot about the house made out of beer cans as their #3. You can see all the results here if you’re interested.
For me – and countless others – what will stick longer than any of these million dollar efforts… that confetti, the teary-eyed MVP and Sean Payton pumping the Lombardi trophy in the air. Can I get a WHO DAT!?!
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Any commercial, moment, image stick in your mind? Weigh in – the comment section belongs to you!
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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4 Facebooking for business guidelines
July 27, 2009In our last post dedicated to Facebookin’ for business we talked about the blurry line between personal and professional. People (your customers) engage with the brands they love and abhor in increasingly public and interactive ways. Facebook’s Pages will help your brand join these ongoing conversations. You can engage your current and potential customers in one of today’s most popular social networking platforms. With more than 200 million users, you’re taking your message to the masses.
But you can’t preach and push. Facebook may give you the opportunity to interact with fans, but it’s up to you to keep them coming back for more. Below are a 4 simple ways to make the most of your Face time.
1. Update your status. 
These short messages help you stay on the radar. Use them to draw attention to new developments or specials, share food-for thought-ideas, comical quips, or interesting quotes. The possibilities for status updates exceed the time you have to read this. Honestly, as long as it’s relevant to your customers and in keeping with your brand – feel free to experiment. It’s a human thing to do – and your goal here is to make a human connection.
2. Upload to engage. 
A picture’s worth a thousand words… which is good because not everyone likes to read. Use photos, videos and links to connect with your fans. Tell a story. Preview a new product. Showcase an event. Facebook handles both photos and videos wonderfully, allowing people to comment on them and then share them with their own friends. Post links too. If you upload content on YouTube or update your blog, share the link with your fans and help drive traffic to those sites. (You can even configure the Notes section of Facebook to import updates from your blog.)
3. Stay active…but tempered. Facebook is not a passive, set it up and let it run itself activity. That said, don’t hog the conversation. You have to find that fine line of appropriate interaction. It’s a small target between your page gathering cobwebs and people hiding your posts because you won’t hush up. You want to be engaging, but not pushy. So, stay away from repetition and multiple postings in a short amount of time.
4. Keep up with your fans.
One of the most beautiful things about Facebook Pages – the Insights. These charts and graphs help you track how many new fans you have, page views, unique page views, demographics about your fans and much more. You’ll find a plethora of information here to help you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts. This tool – which is unique to Pages – can help you modify and optimize your content to make your Page better for your fans. Don’t overlook the value hidden under the Insights button. And don’t be afraid to make adjustments.
Keep these four basic tenets in mind as you build and then maintain your company’s Facebook Page. Certainly it can get more involved and complicated with integrated applications and alternate landing pages and whatnot. But let’s save that for later, because simple or complicated, at the end of the day, the goal remains the same: engage with your audience in a way that strengthens your brand.
Share your Facebook experiences, thoughts, concerns, lessons learned. The comments belong to you.
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Facebooking for business
July 20, 2009
You, or someone in your home or office, Facebooks. Maybe you’ve taken the “What color is your personality test” or posted the highest Pathwords score among your friends. Don’t be ashamed to admit it – you and 200 million of your closest friends are feverishly clicking away approving friend requests, becoming fans of TV shows and joining the group determined to make Ultimate Frisbee an Olympic sport.
All of this sharing and viral networking can be put to good use for your business. The line between personal and professional blurs more with every social interaction. The point of Facebook IS connection and so it provides a handy way to see and be seen by your peers, your customers and even your competitors. Status updates generate comments, which prompt conversations, which builds or reinforces relationships. These interactions help establish and build your personal brand.
Put Pages to work for your business
Facebook offers Pages as a way for your company to have its own social network presence. By building a Page for your business, you join in the conversation. The open sharing among Facebook users paves the way for brands to engage with existing and future customers. Here’s a quick down and dirty example. Beeline Buses creates a Page promoting their business. Sue, a customer of Beeline Buses, becomes a fan of their Page. Sue’s 543 friends on Facebook see she’s a fan of Beeline Buses. Joe, one of Sue’s friends, becomes a fan of Beeline Buses too. Joe’s 678 friends see he’s a fan of Beeline Buses. You see how this chain continues in an almost infinite fashion?
Once folks have pledged their support by becoming a fan – the interaction fun begins. You can send out updates or create events and invite fans to attend. Fans can write on your wall, upload photos and videos to your Page, or participate in discussions with other fans. And anytime you update the status on your company’s Page, fans will be notified in their news feed.
And did we mention? Facebook is free?
We’ll stop here for now to prevent any sort of meltdown or overload. But you do have homework. Sign into your Facebook account and look around for some of your favorite brands. See how they’re engaging their fans. We’ll even give you a jumping off point: http://www.facebook.com/KJACommunicationsGroup. Take a look around, become a fan, write on our wall. Then let us know what you think about this whole Facebookin’ for business idea.
Be sure to join us back here next week, same time and channel. We’ll dive into some easy ways to use Facebook’s Pages for building and promoting your brand.
In the meantime, have you experimented with Facebook? Any insights or lessons learned? Please feel free to weigh in.
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Internet turns up the volume on word-of-mouth
May 22, 2009
Rather than one opinion – you get a chorus. And instead of just a small circle of friends – anyone with a curious mouse gets wind of the glorious numbers written about your restaurant.
Are you aware folks are talking? Do you hear what they’re saying?
Online sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor and UrbanSpoon put your quality grade a click away from anyone looking. These sites, for the uninitiated, are review websites. Yelp tackles everything from restaurants to mechanics and dry cleaners, depending on your location. TripAdvisor boasts more than 15,000,000 reviewers weighing in on vacations, hotels, resorts and restaurants. UrbanSpoon, as you may have guessed, provides a table for diner’s opinions.
At Yelp and UrbanSpoon visitor’s can easily see the ‘best’ in a particular city. And on all of these sites, the reviewers are real people like you and me. (You can even follow a reviewer and see the other businesses they’ve written about.)
This isn’t bought-and-paid-for advertising. Instead, you earn your stars (or stripes) based soley on your customer’s experience.
But unlike word of mouth in days gone by, now you’re able to see a review and adjust. You can learn what’s working and what’s failing miserably. Did you realize your actual location outshines your food? Or the nurse who’s greeting your sick patients seems to suffer from an unhealthy attitude herself? Certainly your heart will flutter when you read “This is what a hotel should be like.” It’s feedback like you’ve never gotten, providing insight you might never have heard.
Plus, now on Yelp you can talk back. When someone complains, for example, that you denied their coupon – you can respond directly to them, publically letting everyone know you don’t have coupons so there must have been a mix up.
All this begs the question – how much are you investing in your quality and service?
Because here’s the bottomline: review sites exist. With the ever-growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, people are talking about you. (And mobile devices make it easy-peasy to let fingers do the talking.) Embrace it all. Use all these comments to better serve your customers. Make them happy…then listen to the sweet songs of praise.
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Oprah’s atwitter
May 5, 2009
…so it must be cool.
It’s hard to turn on your TV and not see talking heads crafting questionable metaphors about this thing called Twitter. Katie, Oprah, Ellen, Ashton and Larry… they’re all twitterpated. Which, of course, prompts growing numbers of couch potatoes and celeb followers to do the same. And while these celebutweets garner hundreds of thousands of followers, they provide varying degrees of insight and little to no conversation.
And you’re thinking – “What’s so wrong with that? If I had the ear of a million people, I’d be rich and famous too.” Would you? Do you think if you decided to begin tweeting your heart out – sharing your dinner menu, dropping Uncle John’s name after a phone conversation, uploading pics of the riding lawn mower and posting links to the YouTube vids that leave you ROFL – you think you’d become rich and famous? Goin’ to step out on a limb here and say – “Uh…no.”
Just a reminder: These famous twitterers walked red carpets long before their fingers found their first tweets. All they’ve done is brought the little .com into the mainstream spotlight. And that’s not a bad thing.
But these bright and shining stars don’t make great role models. They’re still broadcasting. They’re pushing their messages onto folks. Twitter is about relationships. Conversation. Sharing information. Interaction. Oprah follows 11 people. ELEVEN (including the CEO of Twitter – Evan Williams, Ashton, Ellen and Larry). That’s a pretty closed circle of communication.
Back in January we began our own Twitter journey (@thekjacrew ), in an effort to learn and grow – to gleen other’s wisdom and to pass along our own. We’ve since topped the 100 mark… both in followers and in the folks we follow. Sure, that’s meager compared to the populations of Delaware and Idaho who hang on the tweets of Ashton and Oprah. But every day these regular ol’ people teach us more than we ever anticipated, with new insights, opinions and experiences constantly exchanged. We’ve enjoyed conversations, made connections and prepared ourselves to help our clients do the same.
So yeah, having your own @mybusiness or @myname on Twitter is cool. But understand it can be hugely useful too. Search for people who can help you learn more… whether it’s about a certain subject, your own business/brand or your audience. Follow them with your ears wide open. (Remember the “you have one mouth and two ears, so you should listen twice as much as you talk” adage? That holds true in the Twitterverse.) Reply to them and become part of the conversation. And always keep searching and listening to new people… don’t get in a rut of talking with the same 11 people day in and day out.
Twitter can be an incredible tool, but it requires time and dedication. Once you give it an earnest try, you’ll be hooked. But don’t expect hoards of people to come a-followin’ just because you’re tossing off a tweet a minute. In fact, expect them to run in the opposite direction…unless of course your name’s Oprah.
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Buyer be woman
April 22, 2009
Let’s start with a simple exercise. Go ahead, picture your ‘typical’ customer in your head. Seriously, close your eyes and visualize your customer: their age, level of education, the car they drive. Are they married? Single? Kids? See that person in your mind… take a second, because there’ll be a test.
Ready?
The big question: Did she have her pocketbook with her?
“She!?” you ask?
Yes. She. Her. Female. Ma’am. Lady. Woman. Miss. The fairer sex. Chances are, whether you realize it or not – “she” best describes your customer.
Here’s why: Women are the sole or primary decision makers for just about every kind of purchase. Tom Peters, the guru of management gurus, calls women the “instigators-in-chief of most consumer purchases.” Need some numbers?
• 85% of all consumer purchase decisions are made by women
• Vacations: 92%
• New homes: 91%
• Bank accounts: 89%
• Healthcare: 80% of the decisions and more than 2/3 of the spending
• New autos: 65%
• OTC pharmaceuticals: 93%
That’s just hitting the high points. The final numbers are even more staggering. American women account for more than half of the U.S. GDP – or around 5 trillion dollars. And that stacks up impressively in a global comparison.
• Earth’s 3rd largest economy: American men.
• Earth’s 2nd largest economy: All of Japan.
• Earth’s largest economy: American women.
Care to reconsider your initial customer image?
Here’s the interesting thing: even though women keep our economy moving (yes, moms will keep shopping), research tells us they feel misunderstood by advertisers. In one survey, 91% of women said advertisers don’t understand them.
Knowing women make up your target market takes you one giant step forward. But not knowing how to build a relationship with them just keeps you walking in circles.
So, ready to accept that women aren’t just a niche market? Or a minor segment you can market to with some thin patronizing girl-speak? Then it’s time to set your course from Mars to Venus, because men and women are different. Very different.
Judy Rosener, from America’s Competitive Secret: Women Managers: “Women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, and men speak and hear a language of status and independence. Men communicate to obtain information, establish their status, and show independence. Women communicate to create relationships, encourage interaction, and exchange feelings.”
Trust. Comfort. Respect. Communication. These are the expectations of the women making consumer (and in many cases, corporate) spending decisions. Respect the power they hold with every purchase decision. (Women are much more likely to refer you or denounce you.) Authors Faith Popcorn and Lys Marigold put it this way: “Women don’t buy brands. They join them.”
Involve women in your product planning and marketing. Don’t rely on your wife to be your focus group. And don’t make the mistake of painting everything with pink fluff and smiling babies. Look for new and inventive ways to meet the needs, solve the problems, and enrich the experiences of your female shoppers. They really do hold the purse strings.
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TV spreads your message across the miles
April 15, 2009
Research shows that most consumer decisions are based on top-of-mind awareness of a product or service. How do you accomplish this? There are a number of communication vehicles available like radio and television. While radio allows consumers to hear your message, television goes a step further by reinforcing a message with images. And, it still ranks as one of the most powerful advertising mediums that can quickly grow your business.
Why It Works…
The major advantage of TV is its ability to reach huge audiences, since almost everyone watches at least some television. The effectiveness of television is also easily measured through two major aspects: frequency and reach. Over time, studies have shown that these two factors are major contributors to the influential power found in broadcast advertising.
Frequency relates to the number of times a consumer will be exposed to your advertisement. This repetitious strategy reminds customers about the product or service being offered.
Reach is defined as the number of consumers who will actually receive your message. Who are these people? Your target audience, of course. These are the potential customers that you have chosen to communicate with across an advertising medium. In television, these are the people who will see your advertisements.
The careful balance of these two crucial dynamics will drastically affect the end result of your advertising efforts. It’s been proven that consumers have to see a message over and over again before taking any action. This means that an ad appearing once a month on your local television station will have virtually no effect on your bottom line. That short time doesn’t give consumers a chance to develop any kind of retention with your product or service. Think about it … you need new tires for your vehicle. Names like Michelin and Good Year are much more likely to enter your mind than another brand whose ad is only seen a few weeks out of the year. So, think of repetition with your tv ads and you will get the right results.
Want to add something? Let us know what you think.
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