Tweeting the Big Event

We're going social for the Super Bowl! Not so much to comment on the game itself – though I'm struggling with being regional and rooting for Kurt Warner while feeling some Steelers nostalgia after meeting Terry Bradshaw at NADA. Rather, we'll be using Twitter to tweet on the Super Bowl advertising highs and lows in real time. So if you're already a follower, be sure to have your laptop or mobile handy for WA play-by-play. If you're not a follower yet, you can do so now. We will definitely have a post-game analysis here on the blog and may even toss something up during halftime.

Chicken or Egg?

I am by no means the first to point this out. Just Google new pepsi logo obama. After all of the recent chatter on the blogosphere, things got kicked up a notch today when Advertising Age reported that Pepsi actually got cornered on this yesterday at their pre-Super Bowl press-conference. Know what they said? Obama copied us! LOL. I really have no answers or insight here ... Hard to tell which came first. I mean Pepsi obviously came first but did the Obama campaign really base their mark on a soda logo? And just because Pepsi's new TV campaign is decidedly "up with people" are they really ripping off Barry O? Sometimes things in the public sphere tend to mirror each other organically. Dunno. What do you think?

How Not to Work a Trade Show Booth

As you can see from our posts throughout the last four days we learned a lot at NADA. This gathering produces great ideas applicable to the dealership business and to any business working to stay ahead during these challenging times and we can't wait to continue sharing these thoughts with you.

But there's one post I haven't written yet that was on my mind for most of the show. I wanted to wait until I had a moment to compose my thoughts. NADA is a huge show — one of the nation's larger trade shows actually. As a former frequent exhibitor myself, I am fascinated by the trade show world. I've always said you can bleed a lot of money at a trade show but the marketer in me still feels that, if done correctly, they can make a brand come to life. Since I mostly wear the marketer's hat now, I am often focused on creating brand experiences at a booth through careful integration of design, messaging, marketing, and sales.

There's one aspect that often gets overlooked: how the booth is worked by the staff. Let me preface what I am about to say with my understanding that this is a tough time for both the auto industry and the many vendors that support it. Trade shows are expensive and must demonstrate ROI (usually through the leads they produce) if they want to remain a part of the media mix. However, this quest for accountability and leads cannot come at the expense of attacking trade show attendees. Yes, I said attacking.

What did I see? As Dean and I walked the expo hall floor we were mauled and accosted by anything we made eye contact with. We had booth babes (show workers hired less for their extensive product expertise and more for their physical attributes) and every other imaginable incarnation of an old-timey huckster/carnival barker aggressively pushing their wares — even when irrelevant — to anything that would hove into their fields of vision. While taking the risk of actually talking to someone at a relevant booth (more on relevancy later) I literally saw a booth worker leap from his booth in front of an unsuspecting victim. Here is another conversation I heard:

Trade Show Huckster – HUCK for brevity's sake – walks out of booth, intercepting uninterested ATTENDEE and begins following them down the aisle walking several booths away from their own booth.

HUCK: Have you heard of company XYZ?!?

ATTENDEE: Well ... no ...

HUCK: Do you want to learn more about what we do at company XYZ?!?

ATTENDEE: Not really ...

Huck thrusts a stack of brochures at ATTENDEE.

HUCK: Here 'ya go! Take these home and read 'em and then you'll know!!

Both continue on their separate paths, shaking heads in exasperation.

Let me say again, I am not being dramatic. What I saw can objectively be described as attacks, leaping, accosting, etc. As a trade show attendee and a fellow marketer I have two responses to this. As an attendee, due to this behavior, I started avoiding eye contact with the booth workers and their booths. As a marketer, this leaves a pang in my stomach. Because of an aggressive booth employee folks aren't looking at my both much less stopping at it.

Notice in the above vignette I observe both the attendee and the huckster walking away in exasperation. I fully recognize that at a booth you can't sit quietly back like a priest waiting to take a confession. You have to work it a bit but it needs to be relevant to the prospect in order to produce a real lead rather than junk leads to show (fake) ROI. There's truly something to be said for quantity vs. quality when it comes to trade show leads.

After voicing my frustration I started waiting to see if anyone was doing it right. That's when I had the following conversation ...

Nice Booth Guy – NBG for brevity – stands at his booth as NICK walks by ...

NBG: Are you interested in online marketing ?

NICK: Why, yes I am ...

NBG: Let me tell you a bit about about what we do ...

NBG gives a true elevator speech — approx. 2 minutes then closes with ...

NBG: ... now sir I know you're busy today. We have a demo here but if you'd like I can call you later and we can go through it over the phone. Can I swipe your card?
NICK: I'd love it if we could do it later. I am going to give you my business card because that has better information to reach me at and I want to make sure I hear from you.

And ... SCENE. That was a great introductory brand experience. You can break down this successful interaction from the point of view of the exhibitor and the attendee:

• The attendee made a good connection and had an experience that was non-threatening and relevant.
  
• The exhibitor got a lead — a real lead not just a swiped card – and presented his brand as approachable and understanding of customers' time.
  

You see, I chose the word interaction above because both sides got something out of it. That's what a trade show is supposed to be – an interaction. Communion between the brand and the consumer at its most basic level. That's why — when done correctly with careful planning on all fronts — a trade show can be an impressive and effective marketing tool.

All in the Family

Okay so Dean and I may have been the last ones to notice this but when we were at a Toyota/Lexus/Scion event this weekend at the House of Blues in New Orleans we observed an impressive feat of branding. Or, rather, inter-brand branding. As we sat back and enjoyed the mixture of great music and food, we looked up on the closed-circuit TV screens and noticed that the loop they had running featured the Toyota, Lexus, and Scion logos flipping between each other. This loop offered a seamless horizontal flip from one logo to the next and that's when we both saw it — all three of these very different logos are all based on the same basic oval shape (look at the outlines above). The result? When they run together they seem like logical parts of a machine that contribute to a total brand picture and yet 99% of the time — when viewed on their own — all retain the unique characteristics of their brand (they also make up the letters of their brand name — T, L, & S). Way to keep it all in the family, Toyota.

Probably the best remark someone shared with me on this front was the casual yet insightful observation that this kind of total brand synergy is not all that common and couldn't be achieved if you set all of the GM logos up next to one another ...

A Young Mind

Henry Ford once said, "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." Like Henry, the 25,000 car dealers here at NADA are here to keep their minds young – which is even more important as we face new media and an economy more challenging than ever.

It's not just the dealers, though. If you look at the habits of successful people, we all know that they are lifelong learners. On Saturday Ford CEO Alan Mulally addressed the group and talked about his career change a couple years ago when he joined Ford after a storied career at Boening. Airplanes he knew; cars not so much the CEO humbly said. So what did he do? It's pretty simple. He called up some of his dealers and went to work on the showroom floor selling cars. I say simple but I think that this is a pretty impressive and humbling act and shows that Alan is at least working at keeping his mind young.

I also had the privilege of sitting next to measurement genius J. David Power, founder of JD Power and Associates, at a session. Was he giving the seminar? No. At 77 Mr. Power was sitting down with open ears and mind to hear someone talk about measuring ROI in the age of new media.

Do you work to keep your mind young?

Radio Free No More

Today at an NADA session on online media I caught some news from the presenter with insider info as it was breaking (or very shortly there after). Pandora – the online jukebox that grew out of the Music Genome project – will now be adding in-stream ads to their content. You can read the complete story at WIRED.

The folks at Pandora didn't come to this decision lightly. This is just their latest attempt to monetize their site, no doubt brought on with renewed urgency by the troubled economy (Pandora recently let staff go). Personally, I'd thought that they'd had some recent flashes of ad brilliance with well-executed portal takeovers by Dos Equis and Apple. However, it seems that this combined with their display ads have failed at moving the needle significantly thus the addition of the in-stream ads which takes away one of Pandora's unique selling points (for $36 you can subscribe to their premium service which remains ad-free).

What do you think of this? Does this reduce what used to be unique online radio to ... well, radio radio? Are their other ways to monetize a website other than just placing ads on it?

The Pie Looks Different Now

At NADA today, Dean and I attended a session about media planning with special emphasis on new media and the current economic downturn. One of my favorite metaphors for how to look at this particular issue is to think of your total spend as a pie, with various media making up each piece.

There used to be just a few slices of pie – print ads, radio, TV, and maybe outdoor – but over the years the media has multiplied. We've added different pieces – direct marketing, online, social media – and further sliced our pie.

Given the current economic climate, businesses small and large can no longer slice their pie as many different ways. And the pieces that we have need to work for us. As we look at this, we need to pare down our pieces of media pie to only those few things that work for us. In order to do this, however, we need to remember the classic Peter Drucker quote: "You can't manage what you don't measure."

Does your media pie look different? Consider that each week the average adult spends about 4 hours reading the newspaper and/or magazines, watches TV for 16 hours, listens to 19 hours of radio and spends nearly 33 hours online.

Your pie should look different now.