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Movéo Integrated Branding wants to send out a big thank you to all of our clients and everyone involved in this year’s Aster Awards for recognizing our work. The Aster Awards is an annual competition dedicated to recognizing outstanding healthcare marketing on a national level.
We are humbled in being recognized with the following:
GOLD AWARDS:
Saint Francis Hospital — Evanston, IL
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Award: Gold
Entry Name: ‘The Pump Inside Your Chest’
Group: Hospital 150 – 299 beds
Category: Outdoor Transit – Single
Saint Joseph Hospital — Chicago, IL
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Award: Gold
Entry Name: Physician Recruitment
Group: Hospital 300 – 499 beds
Category: Professional Recruitment – Single
Westlake Hospital
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Award: Gold
Entry Name: First Rate Care
Category: Physician Referral Program
SIVLER AWARDS:
Resurrection Ambulatory Care Services — Chicago, IL
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Award: Silver
Entry Name: Center for Breast Care
Group: Specialty Care
Category: Total Advertising Campaigns
BRONZE AWARDS:
Saint Joseph Hospital — Chicago, IL
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Award: Bronze
Entry Name: ‘The Weight Is Over’ Direct Mail
Group: Hospital 300 – 499 beds
Category: Direct Mail Piece – Single
MERIT:
Saint Joseph Hospital — Chicago, IL
Agency: Movéo Integrated Branding — Oakbrook Terrace, IL
Entry Name: Seton Family Health Center
Group: Hospital 300 – 499 beds
Category: Total Adv. Campaign W/Out TV
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If you don’t believe Twitter has any marketing value, get this. You can use Twitter as a research tool even if you don’t have a Twitter page. Would you like an example? I thought so.
Let’s take one of our friends – Stericycle. This company offers an array of product recall services. If they want to know what the Twitter community is tweeting about in regards to the keyword ‘recalls,’ they can go to search.twitter.com and find out. See for yourself: recall-related Tweets.
The search results mentioned above show all the Tweets that mention the word ‘recalls.’ Savvy companies have used this to see who’s talking about their brand and counter it with positive PR messaging. Companies with a Twitter account can reply directly to the user and try to resolve issues, thank them for being a patron, or whatever makes sense. There are endless creative ways to use Twitter. I suggest you start by searching to see what the community has to say about your company. This is similar to Google Alerts, which we’ve mentioned in a previous post, but it only involves people on Twitter.
How have you used Twitter for your company?
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Google is giving away free advertising to charitable organizations.
That’s right. Google is giving eligible charities free advertising using their popular advertising platform – AdWords. The program is called Google Grants and organizations can receive up to $1,000 in spending per day. To see if you’re eligible, simply fill out the Google Grants Application and await a reply.
This is a great opportunity for nonprofits to get their feet wet in online marketing. For those organizations already familiar with paid search campaigns, this is another channel to promote your charity for free. Either way, it will take some know-how to successfully set up your campaign and get the most out of your advertising dollars.
For more information on our PPC services, visit www.moveo.com.
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Remember that famous line in Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come?” Classic quote, but it doesn’t work with your content online. With a little bit of dedication, nonprofits can use social media as a cost-efficient way to improve their reach to online users, but you can’t expect them to come to your site – you have to go to them.
Where are they? Millions of people are active in online communities like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace and Flickr, just to name a few. Of course, not all social networks are the right fit for every nonprofit, but some of them may be terrific channels for emitting your message.
There are a few things to remember before launching a social media campaign. First, be willing to put in the time to understand the community. Social networking members are very, very savvy and they know when they are being spammed. If you are going to join a community, you are joining an ongoing conversation. Contribute to communities, like Twitter, with comments, content and other activity that members will find valuable. Once you’ve put in some groundwork, you will have their trust and you can be a bit more promotional.
Here are just a few examples of nonprofits currently using social network sites:
Do these sites fit your organizations model? It could be the case that your target market doesn’t use social networking, but the potential is there if you can find the right demographics and psychographics. MySpace users are typically younger, LinkedIn is a collection of professionals, etc.
Most nonprofits are tight on resources and time. In this case, you might consider hiring an intern from a local university that is already plugged into many of these sites. Just make sure your message is being communicated properly and is consistent with other mediums.
Do you know of any other examples in which nonprofits are utilizing social networking sites?
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It’s been hard not to notice the massive branding efforts that Pepsi has put forth in the past few months. New cans, new logos, new ads. I’m intrigued to see how this affects their place in the market.
Image courtesy of Adrants
It’s not the first time that Pepsi has made dramatic strides to gain market share from it’s biggest rival (no, not RC Cola) – Coke. The classic example of neuromarketing research involved the Pepsi Challenge campaign of the ‘80’s. Researchers wanted to know why taste tests showed that most people preferred Pepsi, while Coke dominated the market share.
In short, we don’t always rely on logic to make our decisions. Many of our product purchases are triggered by emotion and how we feel about a brand. Therefore, you can say that many of us choose Coke, not because we think it tastes better, but because of its brand or the marketing behind it.
Before neuromarketing, this argument may not have carried much weight. But by using brain scanning technology, neuroscientists found that in the blind taste test, subjects were using the front lobe of their brain to logically decide which drink they preferred. However, when subjects were asked to choose a drink knowing which was Pepsi and which was Coke, the large majority chose Coke and used a different part of their brain to make that decision.
But who says our decisions and purchases have to be logical? Pepsi was assuming that taste is the only influence that drives a beverage purchase. As if there’s a large database in our brains that ranks the order in which we like the taste of a soda and that’s how we claw through the clutter. The fact is that many of our purchases are driven by emotion and that is why branding is so vitally important. In a market with many similar products – the best branding is sure to come out victorious.
I mean, is there really that much difference to a typical consumer between laptops such as Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc? Not really. One person might buy a Sony notebook that lasts them for years and the next person might buy the same notebook and have it bunk out in a year. The difference in who wins the market share is branding.
If you’re interested in reading more about neuromarketing, I suggest picking up Buyology by Martin Lindstrom. It’s full of terrific examples.
Will Pepsi’s new brand efforts make them more competitive with Coke? What are your thoughts on neuromarketing?
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When it comes to the digital media age , more
people are connecting to the internet. They see all these cool features
online
such as chatting, online dating, shopping, downloading and more. When
downloading comes to mind, we want to download freebies rapidly.
A lot of the content on websites is supposedly
free, but
just how free is it? When you want to view free TV shows online, you
have to watch the full commercial so that way they can convince you to
click on their product. You are forced to watch the commercial, but you
have the choice to purchase whatever it is being advertised. You pretty
much sacrifice time even though you do not want to see that diaper
commercial. Some free software websites force you to view a certain
number of static ads to be able to
download their free software. In other cases, you have to do the
marketing for them to
get their product for free. An example is where you have to submit 5
emails
from friends you know before you can get access to play the online
arcade game.
There’s always a price to pay when it comes to free downloads. Will you pay?
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You didn’t hear it here first. In fact, you’ve probably already heard it online, on the radio, on tv, and in print. In March, Dr. Pepper sent out a press release stating that if Axl Rose (Guns N’ Roses leadman) released his record, Chinese Democracy, in 2008 that they would give a free can of Dr. Pepper to everyone in America – except former GNR guitarists Slash and Buckethead. The album had been in development for well over a decade due to Rose’s tired rock star antics.
The story died down after a few weeks of viral buzz and media attention, but it resurfaced when the record was indeed released last month. In an attempt to comply with their end of the bargain, Dr. Pepper allowed customers to visit the Dr. Pepper Web Site within a 24-hour period to claim a coupon worthy of one can of soda. The site eventually crashed due to an inability to handle the flurry of hits it was receiving. Dr. Pepper extended the window of opportunity an extra 24 hours because of the chaos.
Now, Rose is threatening legal action. He’s claiming not only did Dr. Pepper not hold up their end of the bargain, but that this stunt “ruined” the release day of their new album.
Dr. Pepper’s reply to legal threats by Rose and his lawyer:
“We simply commented on the delayed release of Chinese Democracy and openly encouraged the band to release it before the end of the year. Axl even expressed support for our efforts earlier in the year. We are disappointed that GNR’s lawyers are turning a fun giveaway into a legal dispute.”
In my opinion, this debacle of a marketing campaign benefited both parties. Rose is living in paradise city because of the publicity that has bolstered his album to the No. 3 selling record in America. Dr. Pepper’s case is more interesting. Some have criticized Dr. Pepper saying that in the end, Dr. Pepper looked ridiculous. An article in Brandweek, one of my favorite sources for branding news, said “All in all, they came off looking pretty dumb.”
This, however, simply isn’t true. From a marketing stand point, Dr. Pepper has been a pop culture topic for almost an entire year. The mocking press release has traversed through the online community and has appeared in almost every major media outlet at some point since its release. This is the kind of marketing you can’t pay for.
Dr. Pepper had a plan all along. They didn’t wake up one day and say “I despise Guns N’ Roses. Let’s send out a press release to mock the production of their latest album on behalf of our company.” Instead, they wanted to reach their target consumers by producing a press release that they would find humorous – giving them a brand image of young and fresh. I’m not sure if they really thought that this would fuel the band to finish the album, but the end result was almost a year’s worth of publicity for Chinese Democracy and Dr. Pepper.
If anything is in order here, Axl Rose should be thanking Dr. Pepper’s marketing team for sending out the press release that eventually led to all of this buzz. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be willing to bet you a Dr. Pepper that Chinese Democracy wouldn’t be listed as the No. 3 selling record in America right now.
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In a recent Adweek article, Bob Greenberg held forth on the ideal agency structure for the electronic age. Not surprisingly, the model he favors is the same one adopted by his own firm, R/GA. Their “integrated structure,” he writes, “combines nine departmental disciplines: planning, analytics, media, interaction design, visual design, copywriting, technology, account management and production…” By organizing his employees around skill sets –– rather than client or accounts –– Greenberg claims to have eliminated “siloed” thinking –– the kind of “but-we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” mentality that trips up many agencies.
This issue I take with Greenberg’s article is not with his proposed agency structure –– in fact, it closely mirrors the one we use here at Movéo. No, what bothers me is the notion that this integrated structure is a kind of panacea.
True integration –– that is, getting individuals to work as seamless whole –– takes interaction. And interaction is a function of people, not org charts or management models. Interaction takes commitment and effort. It takes getting up from behind your desk and going out of your way to share ideas and information. And no agency structure –– no matter how brilliantly conceived –– can make that happen. Only hard working people can.
And now, at the risk of sounding like Bob Greenberg, I’m going to toot my own horn. One of the things that makes Movéo successful is a commitment to working together. To making sure that everyone has the information they need. And to encouraging great ideas, no matter what quarter they come from. Like agency structure, hard work isn’t foolproof approach to integration. But it’s still the best I’ve seen.
Irene Westcott, Associate Creative Director
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During an economic downturn, there is a great opportunity for a company to gain exposure. For one, their competitors may be spending less, which opens the door for increased market share. And because advertising budgets often take a hit, in some situations it may be cheaper to advertise as agencies and ad mediums are looking for more business.
An interesting article written by Josh Bernoff of Forrester, in February, provides insight into why advertising budgets are often the first to go in a slow economy:
Consumers in a down market pinch pennies. Brand advertising in mass
media loses effectiveness because it’s harder for consumers to go from
“I know about that product” to “I’m going to buy that product” when
they’re worried about their financial future. And it’s less painful to
cut ad spending than headcount. Result: Advertising budgets suffer in a
recession.
Because the recession is driving spending towards performance-based marketing, PPC campaigns will survive the recession. In many cases we may even see some of the traditional advertising dollars move towards paid ad campaigns. If advertising budgets must be cut, it’s much easier to make a case for PPC spending because it has vividly measurable results that you can verify immediately. That’s not to say it’s more meaningful than lasting brand advertising, but it’s just more difficult to argue with real-time metrics when something has to be axed.
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In a down economy email marketing can be both a B2B marketers friend and enemy. As cuts are being made across the board and marketers look for ways to increase sales they must not lose sight of the fact that while price and with that selling, is important, value, or the perception of, is equally important. Your customers and prospects are going to, or rather are already, getting bombarded with offers from companies trying to win their business. And, here's where email could work for or against you.
Every marketer knows email is a cost effective means for getting their message in front of customers and prospects quickly and easily. The temptation in a down economy is to increase the frequency of email for hope of increasing response. The reality is, relevancy our performs frequency. So unless you can increase both the frequency and relevancy of your messages, the smart play is to focus on increasing relevancy. You will get greater response rates from the more relevant content, and you will avoid falling into a sea of white noise with all the other marketers out there who are bombarding your targets with irrelevant offers/content/messages.
Now back to value. As you work to define relevant content for your subscribers, don't forget to deliver some extra added value with it. For B2B marketers added value could come in form of shared knowledge such as white papers or Webinars. The added value will help strengthen the bond between your targets and your brand so that when they are ready to buy, you will be at the top of their list.
To learn more about how Moveo can assist your business with email marketing strategies visit us at moveo.com
Dave Cannon, Director, Interactive Services
