Turning the Spotlight on Your Brand

Have you ever noticed more branded products in your favorite TV shows? Well, you should. According to Nielsen during the first quarter of 2011, researchers measured more than 5,000 product placements during primetime shows on major network and cable stations. Some might think these placements cost millions of dollars—some do and some don’t.

For the sake of this post, let’s focus on those that don’t have to cost millions of dollars. We conduct dozens of earned product placement campaigns for our clients that result in these primetime placements for a fraction of the cost of a paid placement. The cost is contained to a product donation and our time to pitch and coordinate the placement. How do we do this? Relationships, relationships, relationships. It’s all about who you know and how you can help fulfill their need-whether it is outfitting Mike Holmes’ crew with tools for accomplishing the projects on Holmes on Homes or coordinating the installation of a garage door on Desperate Landscapes in Minneapolis, Minnesota to show a homeowner the value of curb appeal.

The key to a successful earned product placement campaign is ensuring you have a sound process for evaluating and fulfilling each of these requests to maximize the impact a placement has on your internal and external audiences. Our process isn’t rocket science, but it does capitalize on the insights we have gained over the past five years of successful product placement campaigns. These insights include keeping in touch with producers as they advance from one production house to another, as well as understanding the audience of their show and demonstrating how our clients can provide a solution to their viewers. The steps of our process are:

• Research and discovery: thoughtfully review the viewer demographics, content and tone of a show compared to your target audience to prove compatibility. Our knowledge of production schedules is key to this step in the process, as lead times for product selection are often 3-6 months in advance of the show airing.
• Pitch development: demonstrate how the product is the right fit with the current production needs
• Request fulfillment: respond quickly and efficiently to the request and manage expectations with the production house
• Follow up and post-placement merchandising: keep in touch with the producer and put a plan in place for maximizing the coverage with target audiences

One thing that many people don’t realize is that these production companies are pitching their shows to the networks, in similar fashion to your PR firm pitching products to media outlets. Once a show gets the “green light” from the network, there is a frenetic pace for coordinating talent, shoot locations, production logistics…and of course, selecting products to fit in the context of the show. Simply put, “time is money” for these production companies – and our process saves them a lot of time – and money. Because the value proposition for our process is so tangible for the production companies, once we earn one placement, we typically get on the coveted “speed dial” list for more opportunities on even more programs.

Just one of these highly coveted placements can result in several million impressions with average ad values of more than $25,000. However, there is an often overlooked value with these placements – and that is the ability to strategically share them with your internal and external audiences. We’ve helped a lot of our clients to extend these placements into fun viewing events with their associates, local market promotions with their dealer/installer networks and plenty of great trade PR opportunities to drive increased sales traffic to dealer or retailer partners.

If earned product placement is not a part of your current public relations program, why not? It’s always exciting to set your DVR to capture your on-screen moments!

Creating A Valuable User Experience

By Kaylyn Bredon, Senior Interactive Designer/UX Specialist

The UX shift

It used to say a lot about your brand if you had any sort of web presence. But now, the world is changing. Today’s web content is infinite—everyone has a website, a subsequent mobile version and there are more apps than we will ever know what to do with. With all these choices, people are flocking to places that provide the best user experience, whether it's to places that make them feel good or to brands that provide them value.

At the South by Southwest festival this year, conversation around the user experience was at the forefront of many discussions. That's because, in the ad world, the campaigns and tools that are resonating the most, are all about the user. They meet the most basic needs, such as functionality working all the way up to delightfully surprising the user with unpretentious amusement.

For retailers, embracing the shift to making the user experience central (or the UX Shift) will result in: increased brand loyalty, repeat transactions, and deeper consumer insight that feeds future brand strategies.

Geo-targeting Consumers: The Potential And The Pitfalls

By Joe Sano, Director, Interactive Services
Marketers and retailers have been grappling with how to best capitalize on “organic” foot traffic near their stores for decades. “The heavy lifting is done! All I need to do is get them in the door!”

Enter geo-targeting (and its other contextually-aware brethren).

The term “geo-targeting” has been around a while, and it’s been used fairly primitively for a number of years. And, by primitive, I mean clunky and/or irrelevant.

But, recent advances in mobile tech have presented some pretty compelling, sophisticated and (surprisingly) user-friendly options that marketers should take notice of. Coincidentally, this is also the reason they were the focus of a LOT of conversation at this year’s South by Southwest.

The importance of adaptation: Evolving agencies

By Steve Agganis, VP Interactive

SXSW is a great place to learn about the existing and upcoming opportunities in the technology/interactive space.  In that regard, the conference is an absolute must and I believe continues to be highly relevant for all marketers. Technology will present itself, apps will emerge and Austin will continue to be weird.

You may have read or heard that this was the year that SXSW “jumped the shark” and was no longer “cool.”

I heard this myself while I was there. And, after a few days, I started to believe that the reason many vets likely felt it wasn’t as “cool” was because marketers have changed the questions they’re asking when presented with new technology.

Re-thinking the in-store experience

By David Smith, Senior Interactive Strategist

In recent months there has been a lot of chatter about the future of brick and mortar retailers. Price-slashing and cost-cutting by online-only retailers, primarily Amazon, has created a shopping environment that encourages consumers to “shop” in store, but buy online.

At SXSW this year, an extensive discussion revolved around this very topic. Here’s our take on the discussion.

Make shopping an experience again

Will most traditional retailers ever be able to compete with the low-overhead, high-volume model of the Amazons of the world? Probably not. But, should they even try?