Learning `Wassup’ at the APMA Meeting

One of the first things you see when you take a close look at promotions from outside the U.S. is how, well, ordinary so many American and non-American campaigns tend to be.

We noted this yet again at the Association of Promotion Marketing Agencies Worldwide’s inaugural Globe Awards, presented in Miami in October to agencies and client companies representing campaigns in seven countries (finalists came from 11 countries) during the organization’s fall conference.

Some winning campaigns from overseas are far from ordinary:

UK: Generating awareness, trial, usage, sales, and a customer database for a new line of light bulbs by hand-delivering bags with questionnaires and product information into two million households, then retrieving and replenishing them the next morning.

Israel: Tying in with an FM radio station to create an interactive, pop-tune centered text-message program on mobile phones that solidly positioned the station with teenagers and got more than 20,000 actively involved.

Canada: Turned Kraft Canada’s TV commercials into a multi-brand promotion with a three-week back-to-school campaign that used the Internet, print ads, and in-store displays to get retailers to distribute game cards, parents to buy product, and kids to place more than 700,000 toll-free calls for hundreds of $500 prizes.

Of course, there were some breakthrough American entries, too. Like introducing a new prescription flu medicine by deploying teams of actors in truck-pulled glass houses and deploying them to 71 cities over two months. And Dunkin’ Donuts calling attention to its 50th anniversary by asking customers to “vote” for their favorite donuts and awarding $50,000 in cash and donuts for life to the overall winner.

What makes such campaigns stand out is (a) how closely they target and interact with the consumer, (b) how unlike anything else they are in the current world of media clutter, and (c) how totally on-strategy and on-message every one of them is with both the brand’s and the promotion’s objectives.

But for reasons of safety, familiarity, predictability, laziness, or simple lack of imagination, too many American promotions tend to define themselves by emphasizing process over creativity, to wit: premiums, prizes, sweepstakes, coupons, rebates, FSIs, direct mail, even the Internet. The point is that, while these may be standard tools of the trade, they’re not in the remotest sense what promotion creativity is about. Needless to say, they never get to the PROs or to the Globes.

How To Get It To put it the way Don Schultz did as the conference’s keynoter, the highly creative ad, promotion, or direct-marketing campaign above all else needs to clearly signal that the brand doing the talking genuinely “gets it” – “it” being the consumer’s identity, attitude, and general frame of mind.

To prove his point, the Northwestern University professor of integrated marketing communications screened an hilariously incomprehensible TV spot for Budweiser beer in which the only intelligible word uttered by a cast of super-casual young males over a long 30 seconds is “Whassup?” And makes the point that the Generation Y it’s aimed at “gets it” – brand message and all, loud and clear.

Think about it: How utterly terrific was it for the Israeli agency and its client to greet, engage, and communicate head-on, on their own turf, day in and day out for weeks, with 20,000-plus teenagers, and how terrific were the results? How bold was the U.K. agency to get its client to pony up for TWO deliveries by hand to two million households in 24 hours? And how powerful was it for Kraft to coordinate its ads and the promotion and team with the network and participating supermarkets on three crucial TV weekends?

Neil Contess, president of promotions worldwide for New York City-based Impiric (which traditionally has been predominantly a direct marketing agency), sees brand marketing as being in a state of transition. The successful agency, he says, will be the one that can move forward using a combination of tools and channels like the ones above – the Internet being one of them – to form seamless and fully integrated programs.

“Brands traditionally have been built by (techniques built around) messaging (advertising) and by relationships (direct marketing),” says Contess. The current phase is “the experiential, in which the consumer defines a brand’s equity in terms of the sum total of every touchpoint he or she has had with it to date, including but not limited to mainstream ads, special events, sponsorships, online and offline promotions, and direct-marketing activities.”

Creativity, in Contess’s scenario, is now defined not only by how well a marketer “gets it,” but by how well an agency is able to bring the right resources – but only those needed – to bear on the campaign at just the right time.

DECEMBER 2000 Robinson & Maites, Chicago, tapped by Ralston Purina Co., St. Louis, to develop and execute a campaign for its Whisker Lickin’s brand of cat treats.

Ryan Interactive, Westport, CT, named Internet agency of record for New York City-based Unilever’s Dove brand through 2001. Parent Ryan Partnership already serves as AOR for Dove’s promotion and direct-marketing initiatives.

Impiric, New York City, named to handle promotion marketing assignments for Atlanta-based TNT and TBS’s broadcasts of National Basketball Association games.

Keller Crescent Co., Evansville, IN, named agency of record for Fruit of the Loom Activewear, Bowling Green, KY, to handle business-to-business advertising, direct marketing, p.r., and promotion.

MarkeTeam, Inc., Laguna Hills, CA, had its agency-of-record status for national accounts on-premise promotions extended by Schieffelin & Somerset, New York City.

Langworth Pantel Group, Inc., White Plains, NY, tapped for promotional work by American Express, BIC Corp., Fujifilm, and JobDirect.com.

Source Marketing, Westport, CT, named promotional agency of record for El Segundo, CA-based Mattel, Inc.’s Matchbox brand, which is located in Mt. Laurel, NJ.

Zipatoni, St. Louis, named to handle interactive promotions for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Oakland, CA.

Eric Mower & Associates, Syracuse, NY, named to provide integrated marketing communications services for research firm Harris Interactive, Rochester, NY.

PriceWeber, Louisville, KY, named agency of record for Fifth Third Bank, also Louisville.

Integrated Marketing Works, Irvine, CA, named agency of record for Signature Control Systems, also Irvine, to develop a corporate identity and brand image for the company through trade advertising, media relations, and promotion.