The Beancast – Old Spice, smelling like me and more – great podcast

Posted on | July 20, 2010 | No Comments

Every couple of months Bob Knorpp invites me to sit in on his marketing podcast, where the panel of rambling heads usually includes the who’s-who of the advertising world. It’s easy for us in the online markting world to forget there’s an entire industry around advertising that’s much bigger and broader than just our narrowly focused niche, so I love joining the show to slice & dice the topics with the great minds Bob brings in.

Can’t wait to start listening? Click here (direct link to an MP3 file)

Though this week’s podcast is titled “Smell Like Duane”, there much more here than smelling like me, I assure you!

This time we talked about a range of topics including (direct from Bob’s show notes to us, so credit to him for the ideas and verbiage):

When Popularity Meets Effectiveness: Everyone’s talking about Old Spice. They just took a Grand Prix in Cannes for the “I’m on a horse” commercial, and this week they launched personalize video responses for a day, mainly responding to social influencers questions. And yet Adweek ran a piece this week highlighting the fact that there’s often a disparity between popularity of an ad and it’s effectiveness. Case in point, Old Spice sales are down 7%. Helen, is there a point where no matter how good an ad campaign is, it should still be killed if it’s not moving product? Is effectiveness the only true measure of marketing? Cannes is talking about having an effectiveness award next year — is that an important move or just an appeasement? Shouldn’t effectiveness be part of the equation for every award that’s handed out? Is the effectiveness debate myopic — does it just serve to highlight that marketing is more than just the advertising and promotions? The charge has been made that with Old Spice in particular is product that makes you smell like your grandfather — so can even the best ad campaign change perception about a product that’s dated? Is it worth anything to a brand to keep advertising and raising brand perception when clearly there are “problems” with the product? Is creativity really an essential component of effectivess as a recent study from the UK’s Institute of Practitioners of Advertising suggests? In their study they found that campaigns that were honored with awards also were 11x more effective at delivering sales — does this say that creativity is the key or that smart marketers also work toward having creative ads?

High-End Moves To Direct Sales Online: It used to be that designer labels would never do anything to jeopardize store placements. So direct-to-consumer selling of any kind was taboo. But now most of the luxury brands have opened up their own e-commerce sites. Joe, is this a smart move for these brands or just a short term response to declining sales that will lead to diminished brand value? Is it just a reality that consumers have less patience for brand experience delivered in-store? Does e-selling actually help a brand deliver better on brand promise by eliminating the haughtiness of the high-end store — does it afford better control?

Digital Dilemma: The numbers are often conflicting, but digital as a whole is facing many questions these days. At a Sun Valley conference this week, Tech companies were eager to showcase to media companies ways to move beyond banner and search ads. But Duane, if clicks are falling as a whole can we really expect interactive video ads and better presentations to be any more effective? Social was supposed to be the next big wave, bringing relevance to the equation — so why are CPMs for Facebook averaging 56 cents while the Internet average is $2.43? We’ve often debated on the show whether brand impression is just as important as a click when it comes to online advertising, but why are buyers and brands so reluctant to believe that? Is the promise of the “click” the Achilles Heel of digital — did we over-promise and now that the industry is maturing we find ourselves saddled with an untenable foundation?

The iConference: The iPhone 4 issues came to a head this week with Consumer Reports saying that even though it’s the best phone around, they still can’t recommend it because of the antennae issue. Also Bloomberg reported that Apple knew about the problems ahead of time, but released the phone anyway. And finally Apple responded with a press-conference to refute the claims and offer either a free bumper case or full refund to customers who weren’t happy. Dan, did Apple handle this with the right tone or will there still be hell to pay? Would this be an issue if it were any other phone? Is it even a problem in the end if folks are still buying the phone no one is returning it and there’s a legitimate fix?

Comcast No Longer Cares: Finally, this week marked a surprise announcement from the de facto father of Internet customer service. @comcastcares, Frank Eliason announced he will be leaving Comcast and sources say he will be heading to Citi. First, Joe, what has Frank’s impact been? We’ve often been critical of the “Twitter magic trick” approach to customer service — in the end did Frank’s great work for Comcast only serve to highlight how broken the rest of Comcast’s customer service was?

Here are the links not just to this episode, but to a TON of other Beancast related things. Heck, even if you’re rockin’ a Zune (my personal thanks to you), Bob has you covered!

The BeanCast RSS feed:
Subscribe to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The show notes for this show:
Episode 111 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The direct file link:
Listen to Episode 111 of The BeanCast Marketing Podcast

The iTunes link for The BeanCast:
Subscribe to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast on iTunes

The iTunes link for Fast Takes:
Subscribe to The BeanCast Fast Takes Marketing Podcast on iTunes

The Fast Takes RSS feed:
Subscribe to The BeanCast Fast Takes Marketing Podcast

The BeanCast AudioBoo Page:
Hear more BeanCast Marketing Talk at AudioBoo

Zune Link:
Subscribe to The BeanCast Marketing Podcast on Zune

You can keep up directly with Bob and his ever evolving, crazy collection of marketing contacts via his marketing podcast website: www.beancast.us