Top 5 Songs in 2008 Commercials

Music is an underutilized tool in advertising. There were a few advertisers who used music as a key element of their advertising, as opposed to a background track to fill dead space.

So here's my list of top songs for 2008:

Advertiser: Amstel Light
Song: Chelsea Dagger
Musician: The Fratellis

Amstel used this spot and this song to reenergize their brand and highlight its import credentials. It is much more male focused than their traditional message. My guess is this is aimed at Heineken and Stella drinkers who view Amstel as a girl's beer. Looks like they are muscling it up.




Advertiser: Bacardi
Song: The Muddle
Musician: ?

Bacardi was a bit genius this year by branding the mojito. These cool spots with thumping music really worked.


Advertiser: Apple iPod nano
Song: Bruises
Musician: Chairlift

What needs to be said? Apple is the master of using music in their spots. Their entire iPod series is pure genius and has created several music hits such as Bruises. Apple is best in class.



Advertiser: Nike
Song: List of Demands
Musician: Saul Williams

Nike is nothing but cool. They use great cinematography and music in all their spots to create an attitude and energy that few other advertisers can match. This spot makes you want to get up an run.



Advertiser: Lincoln MKS
Song: Technologic
Musician: Daft Punk

Lincoln is trying to change its image, to be more edgy, focused on technical superiority, which is a slight reach from where the brand has been. These spots help move Lincoln closer to Cadillac and further away from Buick.





If you are curious about music in commercials there are a few good sources (gotta love the internet):
http://www.squidoo.com/tv_commercial_music
http://www.whatsthatcalled.com/forum/index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=1&
http://adtunes.com/
http://findthatsong.net/
http://www.google.com/Top/Arts/Television/Commercials/

What Business Are They In?

Some companies do not know what business they are in.

The car makers have made this clear. They are in a consumer products business, but run the company like they are a finance company or a manufacturer. Consider Proctor and Gamble. They manufacture a whole lot of products from Pampers to Tide. But they understand the business they are in. They are not run by the finance function or the manufacturing function. They are run by the brand managers.

The U.S. airline industry is another where management has a fundamental misunderstanding of which business they are in. They are run as if they were in the transportation business. Just because you own planes and move people and luggage around doesn't mean you are in the transportation business. They are in the service business, just like Ritz Carlton or Marriott. Ritz Carlton does not treat its guests as if it were in the real estate business just because they own hotels.

Think about it. How memorable is it when a flight attendant is actually pleasant and truly accommodating? When was the last innovation in the airline business that was done for the consumer's interest and not the airlines'? You wonder why Southwest has done well? It has managed to combine good service with cheap prices. The service is appropriate for the price you pay. It is a fair trade and consumers have voted with their dollars.

What business is your company in? Who really runs the company? Companies who really understand their business and their customers have aligned the answers to these two questions.

Are You Spamming Your Email List?

Everyone hates spam. Marketers know this better than anyone. But the reality of today's business environment is driving marketers to send more and more email messages. Budgets are tight and email is free. And more and more people are seeking and obtaining their news and information online. So it just makes sense.

If you are like me, you have signed up for all kinds of websites and enewsletters over the years. My inbox fills up every day with emails that I have supposedly asked to receive. Its too much. It borders on spam. But I asked for this right? So when do opt in emails become spam? How do you actually define spam anyway?

Typically, it seems spam is defined in terms of the sender -- spam is an email sent by a faceless, nameless individual to people who didn't ask to receive it. Fair enough. But there is a legal form of spam that is only getting worse -- Opt-in Email Assault or "OEA" as I call it.

We have all been victims of OEA. You know how it goes. You are forced to register with a web site and in the process they ask you if you want to receive email updates. "Sure, why not." And then it starts. Two emails the first day. Four the second day. Six by the third day. By day three you aren't even deleting their emails, but the view pane in your email opens it so the marketer on the other side is all excited because 40% of his recipients are opening his email.......

As marketers, we often assume that if a user has signed up and opted-in to our emails that we have all the permissions we need to reach out to those users whenever we want.

So what is the right number of emails to send to your user base, you may ask? When does it become spam? Answer: when the user decides your emails are not valuable or relevant.

For a recipient, spam has much less to do with the number of emails and everything to do with the relevancy of the information to the user. If the user wants each and every one of your emails because they find them useful or informative, then it isn't spam. If you send them dozens or hundreds of messages they don't want, users will consider it spam.

Here's a formula:
Limited number of emails of Low Relevancy = Slight Annoyance
High number of email of Low Relevancy = Spam

The trick is providing valuable content and understanding the interests and needs of your user base. Users are now expecting to control the ways marketers communicate with them. It is now on the users terms and if you don't allow them to choose those terms, you risk frustrating or alienating your users. The more specific and specialized you can be, the more relevant and valuable your emails will be. Here are a few rules to follow with your opt in email lists.

Allow your users to:

1. Tell you as specifically as possible what kind of information they want to receive.

2. Determine how often they want to receive messages from you.

3. Determine through which channels you communicate with them.

Email is such a frustration for people, if you add to that frustration it can only hurt your brand.

Posts Video, Photos Direct From Email on Posterous

Check out Posterous. It is a site that allows you to post video and photos to a unique page that they create for you just by sending an email. You can set password controls or leave it open to the public. And its free.

According to Techcrunch, they apparently just got a new round of funding. It will be interesting to see how they monetize this.

They announced today a new group blogging feature that allows groups to send in posts directly to the blog. Seems ideal for groups of friends, families, reunions, etc. I started using Posterous today and it is wickedly simple to use.

Very cool service. Seems like the kind of app facebook or google will want for Christmas.

Saab Proves GM Doesn't Get Consumers

So my theory about Detroit is that they have struggled because they are not consumer focused companies. And probably haven't been in decades. Saab is a perfect example.

GM went looking for growth in the late 1990's like all the other car makers. With Saab they saw an opportunity. Unfortunately, what they saw was an opportunity for themselves. Here is what I mean.


Saab has been a quirky, little brand for years with lots of loyal Saab owners. (Disclosure: I owned three Saabs in the 90's.) The Saab loyalists loved the outsider personality of the brand. They loved the unusual, even odd, designs. They loved that their cars were quirky and considered it personality, part of the charm.

The big publicly known problem with Saabs was that they were mechanically challenged. To own a Saab was to know a mechanic on a first name basis. GM looked at Saab and said, hey we can solve their biggest problem. We can put in GM engines and share the chassis across different brands such as Subaru. It will create efficiency and reliability. We can also make the designs a little more mainstream and attract a broader consumer base once the mechanical reliability is improved. With Saab, they saw the opportunity to solve their own problem, excess manufacturing capacity.

But there was a problem with this approach. It isn't what the Saab owners wanted. The Saab consumers would not take mechanical perfection if it meant giving up the personality of their Saabs. And this is exactly what GM did.

GM put in GM engines and "redesigned" the 9-3, their base model to try and attract new, young buyers who have never purchased a Saab before. They were successful at first, but here is what has happened since then. Saab is now selling less than half the units they did in the first year of GM ownership. Saab loyalists have all but abandoned the brand and those new 9-3 buyers don't seem to be buying a second Saab.

So by creating an efficient (read as less costly to produce) product that appeals to a broader market, they managed to completely change the brand and misread the loyal customers that they inherited. Ford, in a rare example of consumer focus, understood that Volvo = safety and practicality. They have not changed the core brand values. (It still may not save them from being sold, but at least the brand is intact.) Saab used to equal interesting design and fun driving. Not so much any more.

GM made its initial investment in Saab in 1990 and took full control in 2000. US sales climbed to a record 47,914 in 2003. In 2008, they were down 31% through October. Last year, GM sold 9.55 million vehicles globally, making Saab a small, distracting brand with 125k units sold. Now it seems that Saab is on the block. Too bad. It didn't have to be like this. If Detroit understood brands and consumers, this might have been avoided.

Where Detroit Went Wrong

Here is my theory. The Big Three stopped being customer focused businesses decades ago.

Every company has a personality, which most of us call the "culture" of that company. And in every company there is one business function that really controls the company. For example, finance, manufacturing, marketing could all be the function that calls the final shots. At P&G it is marketing, at Fed Ex it is operations, at Citi it is finance. Most times this is unwritten, but understood by all.

So much of a company's culture is determined by the dominant function within the company. At the automakers, finance and manufacturing long ago became the dominant functions and ultimately drove the products that the company made. How else do you explain the Pontiac Aztec?

With perhaps the exception of their pick up trucks, the Big Three have not built cars that people really want in many, many years. Their quality is apparently equal to the other car makers now. So why don't we want to buy American cars? Because they weren't designed and built based on what we want. They were designed and built based on what the company wanted to build, the need to feed their large manufacturing operation busy, the need to pay their long term obligations. And to be clear, the dealers are not end consumers and depending upon their opinions is better than nothing, but no substitute for meeting consumers needs.

To be fair, I think Ford is now taking much more of a consumer focus and their CMO Jim Farley is their best chance at bringing the consumer's voice into the design and engineering studios.

If the U.S. automakers were consumer focused and not internally focused, their brand strategy would have made a whole lot more sense. What role does Buick play in their product portfolio? Why do they make the exact same model under the GM label and Chevy label? We all know it is exactly the same car/truck. So what is the point?

In recent years, realizing their products weren't meeting broad swaths of the market, Detroit began buying foreign automakers like Volvo, Saab and Hummer. But look what GM did to Saab. They tried to standardize their engines and platforms. The designs became more vanilla and units sold have dropped by almost half since GM purchased them.

Jim Farley and his comrades are the key to the Big Three's survival, with or without a large bailout package.

Managing Your Personal Brand Online

With the proliferation of news sites, social networking profiles and video and photo sharing, you (your name or your photo) can probably be found all around the Internet. Increasingly, people are trying to manage their online brands. But before you "manage" your mentions, you need to know what mentions are out there. There are a couple of easy, interesting ways to do this:

Google:
If you are like most of us, occasionally you type your name into google to see what you will get. To get automatic updates you can set up google news alerts with your name as the key words and you will get an email any time a news story or blog mentions you.

Addict-o-matic:
This is a site that searches major websites and services for mentions key words. It searches Twitter, Google Blog search, Yahoo News, Flickr among others. It is a great way to search a large number of important sites and services.

Technorati:
Technorati is a well know blog search engine service. They seek to make the blogosphere accessible. You can search for blogs by topic. You can see which blogs have the most traffic. You can also search your name if you so choose to see if you are coming up in any blog discussions. Unlikely for most of us, but you half-famous people may need this.