Archive for April, 2011
One thing advertising and marketing folk seem to like to do is tear down other people’s work. At times I am no different. Often I find myself watching a television spot or see a print ad and think to myself – “C’mon Man – we could do better than that!” I will admit that I have absolutely no certainty of what the mission was, or how involved the client might have been in the creative process. And clients do have a propensity for sticking their noses in the creative process – after all it is their money.
Brand oriented spots in particular can leave me shaking my head going – huh? What was that about? And there are times when I will watch a well made TV spot and then have no recollection of who the client was immediately after!
While I am not a drinker of Bud Light the ‘Here We Go’ campaign is omnipresent to anyone that watches sporting events on TV. The just completed NCAA basketball tournament was a prime example. A good brand spot gets into your head and I again realized this when I was watching the third set of the Rafael Nadal – Novak Djokovic men’s tennis final from the Sony Ericsson tournament this past Sunday afternoon.
As the two players tied 6-6 in the 3rd set a tiebreaker was imminent and the commentator said – ‘Here We Go’. I immediately thought of Bud Light. How did they get to own that phrase? I don’t even drink the beer but the brand/word association was powerful.
Think about how often you hear the phrase ‘Here We Go’. I think fans of sports on television where Bud Light is running those spots will have no choice but to associate the phrase and the beer. That’s the whole point isn’t it?
And the bonus is that Bud Light is creating new words for the lexicon. Where else have you ever heard the term ‘shramplicate’? But I bet in the context of the ad http://bit.ly/eF0125 you know what they mean.
Good branded television spots don’t have to be great demonstrations of artistic advertising – and the Bud Light campaign is a prime example of that. But campaigns do have to persuade and be memorable. I think the ‘Here We Go’ campaign achieves that.
Do you?
An article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal highlighted http://on.wsj.com/hW9aGd something I (and many people like me) have been thinking for a long time. Although we’ve been paying into the Social Security program for more than 30 years (hey we were working in our teenage years!), there is a real possibility that Social Security will not be available for today’s fifty year olds until their mid or late seventies – if at all.
Recently I checked on my own projected SSA benefit at the .gov website http://1.usa.gov/fC1VlM that shows what one would take out on a monthly basis. For me the amount would not be insubstantial but it’s still a very long time before I could qualify to take the maximum benefit (most people will defer to that number in the hope they won’t need to reduce their ‘benefit’ by taking it earlier with penalties).
I realize that the minimum age for social security will continue to increase. The intellectual part of me knows that this has to happen in order for the system to remain solvent as long as possible. But that does very little for those people who are counting on Social Security as a substantial part of their ‘retirement’ income.
My particular generation may well have the distinction of paying into the Social Security system longer than any previous generation (since the minimum age is continually rising) and then have nothing left to take out when our time comes.
United States politicians are ‘aware’ of the problems and issues. President Obama and all of his recent predecessors have talked about problems with the future of the Social Security program. All would like you to believe that they will figure out a way for Social Security to be there for Americans. Given the current national debt problems I don’t see how Social Security can last twenty years without dramatic changes – changes that heretofore have been deemed anathema.
I don’t wish to be the dark cloud of doom on a spring Monday morning. But being a realist, has me thinking that my wife and I had best not plan for Social Security to ‘supplement’ (wasn’t that the original idea behind it in the first place?), our retirement income.
Of course I’m not even thinking about retirement. And while that does not bother me it’s a good thing since I think we’ll be working for many years to come. It’s also a good thing that I like what I do and generally enjoy working. But that’s hardly the case for many other people and there is bound to be some serious resentment on the part of people counting on Social Security when they realize it either is not going to be there until age 77+ if at all.
We’ve all been paying into the Social Security system. Are you counting on Social Security to be there when your turn comes?
When I view the home page on Twitter I always take a peek at what topics are ‘trending’. It’s often the quickest way to find out what people are talking about. Of course what people talk about can be amazingly trivial and uninteresting.
Take a look. Right now I just peeked and saw Chad Pennington (a Quarterback for the Miami Dolphins), apparently tore his ACL playing off-season basketball. One comment on the oft-injured QB was that even without football he can find a way to put himself on injured reserve. Earlier this week there was a trending topic ‘RIP Jackie Chan’. I took a quick scroll down the list and many people were aghast that the news (totally untrue) was shocking but most people did not believe it.
GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons was also a trending topic today – he posted a video of he and some team members on safari in Africa shooting and killing an elephant, the elephant was alleged to have been trampling a sorghum field thus impoverishing local farmers and causing starvation. This will no doubt be all over the news in the next few days with people calling for boycotts of GoDaddy.com.
What makes a trending topic? Obviously the things that people are tweeting about. And (by some counts) with more than 100 million Twitter users that’s a pretty large sample (granted most users actually tweet rarely). So what makes a trending topic is having a substantial number of people Tweet about something that they find interesting and want their followers to see. You can select trending topics to be segmented by country, or even by city. Take a look at what’s trending in Brazil or Turkey for example.
Not all of the trending topics are trivial however. I first saw the news of the tsunami in Japan as a trending topic on Twitter. I immediately searched for more news. The speed at which people tweet an event is mind-boggling at times. I can’t imagine being that plugged into everything that is going on that I would be able to (or want to) be an early tweeter of what will be a trending event.
At the same time trending topics on Twitter do act as a representation of some collective consciousness of what people are thinking about. I find that very interesting and I am betting it will get even more interesting as more people jump into the Tweetstream.
Non-social media users like to make fun of Twitter and readily admit that they don’t get it, and don’t have time for what they consider to be nonsense. As a marketing guy I find the maturation of Twitter and Twitterites (it would be good to settle on one name for those that Tweet I admit) to be a good study of the way human beings interact as well as how communications are evolving.
And I am somewhat relieved but sad to learn that they caught the missing Bronx Zoo Cobra – who which by the way has more than 200,000 followers. And many of the tweets from the @bronxzoocobra were both clever and hilarious. It’s good to laugh at work sometimes.