This year it’s renovation throughout the nation

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 30, 2011

If you’re taking some time off this Christmas season, my bet is that part of the time will be spent in your jeans and runners, hammer or paintbrush in your hand, doing a bit of renovating.

The amount depends on whether the place is owned or rented, but this is the perfect time to get those things done that have been bugging you all year. Rest assured that you will not be alone in these tasks.

A major result to come from the astronomical house prices and the prohibitive cost of changing homes, is that renovation is back in a big way.

Take Bunnings. Their annual report was able to boast a 5.7 per cent sales growth when so many other retailers were bemoaning a declining market. And they opened a further 27 of their huge stores around the country. That’s an awful lot of hammers and nails.

Dulux also told a happy story at this month’s AGM. Home renovation has been a major factor in driving their underlying net profit close to $80 million this year.

We know that these increases were not caused by new home building because the Housing Industry Association reports a further decline in new residential work. This past year’s new housing starts were down by five percent, and the HIA predict that next year’s will be twice as bad.

This is hard to understand, at a time when existing houses are so over-priced and the need for more homes so obvious. Meanwhile, the September quarter saw renovations hit a new high of $2 billion.

Like all the rest of Australian retail, hardware is going bi-polar. Bunnings have ruled the roost for years now, squeezing the other chains like Mitre 10 and Thrifty-Link, forcing them to grow big or disappear.

But another chain of aircraft-hanger sized stores has started moving in, armed with lots of street cred.

Where Bunnings is part of Westfarmers, which owns Coles, it completes that mogul's royal flush of dominance in the marketplace from coal and fertiliser to retail chains and stationery to fuels and hardware.

Of course Woolworths wants its own toolkit, too. And now they have it. In partnership with American hardware giant Lowe's, they have started building the Masters hardware chain. The first opened recently in Braybrook in the City of Maribyrnong. Another 150 are already on the drawing boards.

This is a market where you have to be big to survive. If you've ever renovated you'll know what it's like - you desperately need an articulated gusset to fill the hole you've made in the wall but the first couple of local stores are too small to stock the range you need. You drive the extra miles to Bunnings, and that becomes a habit whenever you need something.

Mitre 10 know this and are rapidly building bigger stores, now bankrolled by grocery distributor Metcash who bought into the franchise chain this year.

The other big franchiser, Thrifty-Link, have announced the theme of their conference at the end of January: fighting back at the competition.

Even though Woolworths have committed $100 million to the Masters roll-out, they will open at most 20 a year. So it will be quite a while before they are able to stand toe to toe with Bunnings' 289 stores and trade centres.

Now finish your coffee, fold this newspaper, pick up your paintbrush and get back to work on the house. And do be sure to have a very happy - and productive - New Year.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

To live a mile high, you’ve got to be rich as a sheikh

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 23, 2001

How would you fancy living in the sky, a mile above the street? That's the plan for the Mile High Tower, due for completion in 2013. It will dwarf the current tallest world record holder, the kilometre-high Burj Khalifa opened in 2010.

Now that's an interesting building - it started life as the Grollo Tower, remember that? When the burghers of Melbourne decided that we don't really want the world's tallest building in our front yard, the concept moved north.

But this column is not about buildings. It's about money and power. You see both these buildings are in a place we know lots about, and nothing about. Arabia and the gulf states.

The mile-high Kingdom Tower (right)is being built just north of Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. The Burj Khalifa is in Dubai, on the Persian Gulf. They are both reflections of the huge wealth and power of this region.

Who are the richest people in the world? Well at $80,000 a head the Qataris come out well ahead. And that's in a country one-sixth the size of Tasmania.

They could teach us a thing or two about sovereign wealth funds, too. Like us they have made vast incomes out of their resources. The Qatar Investment Authority fund is worth $70 billion. For a population of native citizens of 250,000. The other million and a half non-citizens do well, but they are essentially guest workers.

But what is the use of all this wealth if it does not buy you influence? Qatar showed the world how this is done when Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir, set up Al Jazeera in 1996.

This Middle Eastern version of CNN has rapidly become a major news force world-wide, by maintaining high standards of journalism and relatively unbiased coverage of events. Qatar may be just a thumbnail on the world map, but it has a loud and insistent voice.

The lesson of the value of media - and opportunity of investment - has not been lost. Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal took his own plunge into social media this week by investing $300 million for a "strategic stake" in Twitter. That's an awful lot of tweets.

There's another major sale coming up next year that will have the sheikhs queuing down the corridors. Facebook is set to launch its initial public offering (IPO) and speculation on the funds gathered runs as high as $10 billion.

Remember that scene in the movie The Social Network, the story about the launch of Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg is telling his growing staff that part of their pay will be in share options, and that in time these will be worth a fortune.

Well that time has come, and the market is estimating the sale will create at least a thousand instant millionaires. The venerable founder and CEO will be all of 27 years of age.

Now don't you wish you studied harder in your computer classes?

Modern technology - the internet, smartphones, and social media that they carry - have made a profound difference to the rulers of the world, and we see its striking affects in the middle east. They have made life very hard for despots, always the world is watching, as they discovered in the Arab Spring.

Now the people and businesses of the Middle East have come to a fork in the road. Do they follow the mega-rich investors and ride sky-high into a prosperous future, facing the fact that social media will make them transparent? Or will they follow the road of the fundamentalists and lock themselves back in the middle ages?

ray@ebeatty.com

Think of those suffering Xmas Torture!

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 16, 2011

As I walk through our city’s department stores and shops this festive season, I can’t help feeling a pang of painful sympathy for all those brave folk who work in them.

You see, in my student Christmas holidays I worked as an assistant in a men’s clothing retailer. It was an old fashioned store with timber product drawers and mannequins that looked like they had been modelled on The Follies of '36.

But the owner did allow himself one touch of modernity. An eight-track audio system. No, not a multi-channel mixer, these were the bulky packs that preceded the cassette tape. They had a length of about an hour and automatically started again when set for “repeat”.

For Christmas he had two tapes, with carols and Christmas songs. And they played from opening time to final close, continuously.

After a while it became a version of the Chinese water torture. Drip drip drip - merry - drip - jingle - drip - shepherds - aargh!

So yes, my friends in the retail stores, I do know what you are going through right now, and you even have to pretend to be happy and festive in the process.

Obviously they have the same problem in Sweden. And a retailer has cleverly made a promotion out of it.

The electronics store Pause is running a promotion called “Xmas Carol Torture!” And the first prize is a stereo system. To win it, however, you have to face the music.

Their web site (xmascaroltorture.com) plays a jolly version of Jingle Bells, in English. Continuously. The winner will be the soul who lasts longest watching the screen and listening to the carol.

Oh you can’t skive off and leave the computer running. Every minute or so a santa head on the screen laughs “Ho ho ho!” and you have to quickly click it with your mouse. When I looked at the site someone had made it to over two hours. I lasted about four minutes.

This technique can be used with interactive TV, as Burger King did in the US recently, with a campaign called “Whopper Lust”.

You had to sit in front of a dedicated channel on Direct TV, which for a week showed only a flame-grilled burger slowly turning on screen. The challenge was, watch this burger for five minutes and get one free. Watch it for ten minutes and you get two.

Presumably they believe that the spinning stack of bun, meat and tomatoes will hypnotise you into an insatiable desire for the burger.

Maybe they were right - more than 50,000 burgers were won during 13,500 hours of TV advertising. Once again you had to click in response to prompts or else you would be returned to the start. Obviously some people have nothing better to do with their time.

In my supermarket the PA system continuously plays “Woolworths the fresh food people”. This is a rather lovely song. Until you have been in the store for the umpteenth time this month and you hear it wafting down the aisles even as you pick up a trolley.

My silent sympathy goes out to those poor souls who know that every morning of their working lives they will be greeted by that jolly voice - and that it won’t stop ‘till they have clocked off.

I have to plead guilty myself. One jingle I created long ago was “Food Plus your store with more”, and every time I visited one of the convenience stores it would be tinnily chirping from the ceiling. Even though it was my own baby, after a while I would have happily thrown a boot at the loudspeaker.

ray@ebeatty.com

Celebrating the birth of the polls

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 9, 2011

Opinion polls rule! Politicians jump at their peaks and troughs and are quick to dump candidates, even leaders, who can’t get the numbers. Products are minutely researched before they see the light of day.

We know about how many of us are fat or thin, when and how we shop, what we feel about any issue from a war to a proposed traffic island, and how often we have sex - and with whom. All is known to the all-seeing eye as we are pursued by armies of researchers.

But 70 years ago none of this existed. Here in Australia we may have read an occasional article about opinion polls in America, but on this quiet isle we relied on taxi driver polls.

Then in 1940 Sir Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert) sent his bright young accountant, Roy Morgan, to the US to find out about opinion polls from Dr George Gallup, founding father of the industry.

When he returned, Morgan was Australia’s leading - only - expert on the subject and immediately was put to work researching for this paper’s ancestors, the Melbourne Herald group.

In the spring of 1941, three months before Pearl Harbour, Murdoch set Morgan the task of measuring a “reader interest survey” for the Sydney Sun. It was Australia’s first “Gallup” opinion poll, measuring attitudes to equal pay for men and women.

Incidentally 60 per cent were in favour, showing that even 70 years ago, Australians were egalitarians.

However, political polling was tricky in the middle of a fierce war, but after it ended Morgan applied the Gallup method to pick the winning party for the next five federal elections from 1946 to 1954, within a margin of 1 percent.

Today of course an election would be unthinkable without its polls - and just about every other week in the year.

The Roy Morgan Research Centre became independent in 1959, though it received housing, power and postage from The Herald until 1973. But the other papers, and then television channels, were not going to take this lying down.

Since the late 60s, a number of polling companies have pushed forward. These days News Limited features within its stables the Newspoll and the Galaxy Poll.

In the early 70s Rod Cameron, whose research had guided John Cain, and then Bob Hawke, to their victories, formed ANOP. Fairfax use multi-national grocery researchers Nielsen.

What they all share is a high degree of accuracy that has grown from long practice. At the end of most modern campaigns, the postmortem shows all the major companies within a couple of percentage points of the outcome.

In both politics and consumer research they have introduced innovative methods. We are now familiar with political debates being underlined by a “worm”.

Morgans claim to have devised it, but the term “worm” has rapidly become a common noun so now it is named The Reactor . This is the squiggly lines across your TV screens as politicians debate, to show the public’s immediate reaction.

This is now available as an iPhone app from the Morgans web site so you can participate in research wherever you may be. The plan is to encourage TV viewers to comment on programs as they run - the good bits, the boring bits, the flow of interest. So if you want you can invite the all-seeing eye into your home.

Meanwhile, today, Morgans are having a 70th birthday party.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Leapfrogging phone war

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday December 2, 2011

If there’s one thing the advertising industry loves it’s a war. Oh, not the “bang bang you’re dead” kind - the “my product is better than yours” kind.

Once the companies don their war paint and charge into the streets, they will stop at nothing - and advertising is one of their cheaper options.

As I predicted 18 months ago, the mobile phone companies weren’t going to lie down and let Apple steamroll the market. They have billions of dollars of investment to protect and they have been working with fury on all fronts: the product development, bells and whistles, retail deals and of course the flood of mobile phone ads we see.

The combined marketing onslaught must be working. Despite the impression that everyone who sits near to you on a train or a café has an iPhone, these days it’s hard to tell the difference between the real Apple and the many similar fruit around.

In fact, Samsung last month proudly declared that their S2 phone had hit top spot in Australian smartphone sales. This follows a year that saw Apple knock Nokia off its perch, now they are under attack themselves.

HTC is another fast-growing phone. The Taiwanese company has startled American analysts by snatching the lead from both Apple and Samsung. Two years ago the company only sold its phones under the stickers of other companies. Now it is selling one quarter of all smartphones in the US.

This leapfrogging looks like the way of the future in the volatile market. Most of the contenders are taking advantage of Google’s Android operating software, highly praised by the critics and allowing the phones to perform new tricks.

Android is an “open code” software. In other words, it is made available to anyone who wants to use it for no fee. Apple’s code, by contrast, is strictly proprietary - and not allowed into anyone else’s hands.

Except, that is, for the bit that allows external developers to attach their applications to the iPhone. The apps market has been the secret to the phone’s success. The last figure I heard was that there are now half a million of the little programs available for iPhones.

However, the developer has to pay Apple a royalty of 30 per cent for any he sells. Whereas Android’s will be royalty-free. So you can bet that all those apps will quickly be edited to fit the Android space.

The Australian phone wars are making world news too. Determined to throw a spoke in Samsung’s wheel, Apple has tried to ban Samsung’s new tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1, arguing that it will take away iPad 2 sales - so far they have sold 500,000 iPads in Australia.

Then, just two days ago the Federal Court overturned an injunction and the Galaxy could be selling by next week. So expect another flood of advertising to pour out of the fortresses of the rival corporations. Their advertising agencies must be rubbing their hands in glee.

A new ad in the US is delighting in poking fun at the devoted Apple fanboys. It features a round-the-block line waiting to buy the newest iPhone release. The camera eavesdrops on the Apple corps.

"I am so amped, I could stand here for three weeks," says one.
"Only seven people stand between us and meaning," says another.
"If it looks the same, how will people know I upgraded?" wonders a third.

Doubts start creeping in - the Samsung has a bigger screen, the Apple has battery problems and isn’t 4G. But one determined fanboy sums it up:

"I could never get a Samsung. I'm creative."
His friend chips in: "Dude, you're a barista."

Expect to see a lot more fireworks from Roman candles to bangers to mortars as this war gets progressively more bang-bang.

ray@ebeatty.com

How do you get the shoppers back to the shops?

Herald Sun, Friday November 25, 2011

Like the waves pounding on the Bass Strait coast, the changes in our buying patterns roll in relentlessly. It’s a natural phenomenon with no regard to the damage being wreaked on ships and shore. Great sandstone cliffs can be worn to collapse and carried away in the undertow.

Just last week the Australian National Retailers Association declared it is making an effort to cling to Christmas. Together with Commercial Radio Australia they have started a campaign nominally priced at $5 million, although much of it is advertising provided by the radio stations.

Having listened to the campaign commercials and read the literature on their web site, I can only find one word to describe it: wet.

Wet as in weak and mealy-mouthed. They do not actually tell us who they need protection from. Is it the multinational invaders? The booming on-line shopping industry? The strangling, selfish supermarket giants? But no-one is targeted, which means the campaign will never hit its mark.

The commercials themselves are awful. If they are the best that the combined brains of our Australian radio industry can produce - well that confirms my sadness at the creative decline of radio in this country.

There are major problems facing the retailers and they do need help from us, their customer base. But they will not make a difference by bombarding us with figures.

They tell us there are 140,000 retailers. That’s a lot. And they employ 1.2 million people. Yep that’s a lot. But somehow these figures do not give me the need to leap for my wallet.

The bright-voiced announcer goes on that these are mums, dads, uncles, aunties, sons and daughters. Yup... most people are.

But we’re talking here about winning back the hearts and minds of a population that is drifting elsewhere. From the retail strip to the mega-mart. From the local café to the multinational chain.

Most worryingly, away from shops altogether. You might remember my column a couple of weeks ago, featuring the subway wall in Seoul which had been converted into a virtual market. Commuters can order their groceries with a click of their mobile phones.

To combat these waves of progress, we need to be more cunning. The campaign needs to give our mums and dads et cetera, a reason to want to visit shops.

Any campaign planing should start with the question: what would make people prefer the jostle of a busy street to the canned music of the supermarket? Or, the bigger threat, the comfort of their livingroom computer?

Mandy Vere, writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, summed it up: “They have goods for you to peruse and handle, feel and read; free p&p; the joy of serendipity; live, and often knowledgeable, staff – sometimes even with smiles and conversation.”

You can feel the cloth and put on the shoes, enjoy the variety of choice and explore shops you had never seen before. It is this physical, emotional experience that needs to be communicated, not statistics.

When New York’s Department of Commerce wanted to promote its city and state, in 1977, it hired the hottest agency in town, Wells Rich Greene, and the great graphic artist Milton Glaser.

Because they gave the job to the best they got a campaign that was brilliant in its simplicity: I Love New York -

It’s still running today, and every city in the world has picked up the graphic - just take a look at the souvenir shops in Swanston Street.

I’m sorry retail association and radio stations, I give you an F for your campaign, with the note: “Engage your hearts and start again”.

ray@ebeatty.com

The wee folk have invaded your head

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 18,2011

In life, and in business, you have a constant battle with the little people. Those wee folk who inhabit your head and keep nattering away at you, pushing and tugging and trying to nudge you off course.

With me the most persistent imp is Prue Krastinator. It's she who says "This can wait until tomorrow" or "You've got a week before deadline, leave the job ‘til Friday." Boy she's got me into trouble over the years.

If I let my guard down and neglect to write up my to-do lists for a couple of days I get rapidly landed in the soup. Has she ever come your way? From what I can see she has a lot of siblings in this town.

Another troublesome inhabitant of my cranium is Shootya Mouth, who is forever tossing dumb quips into the breech and urging me to fire indiscriminately without first engaging the brain.

Fortunately as I've got older he has become easier to control. But you can't afford to let your guard down because this one's as cunning as a cat, slipping in when you're stressed, excited or otherwise engaged - like in the middle of an important meeting.

His sister is called Weakas Water who won't say a thing until it's far too late to speak out. She worries she might offend or ask too much or otherwise sour the atmosphere.

Consequently she sets up situations where matters which were small glitches to be smoothed out, are left until they become major problems to be unravelled. She thrives on the fact that we all like a peaceful life and will keep putting off saying that most difficult word: "No".

Then there’s cousin Lazy Daisy whose favourite posture in life is stretched on the couch with a box of chocolates at the elbow and a remote control in hand.

Hours and days can drift past unnoticed until you suddenly realise that you’ve run out of customers, or the deadline's tomorrow, or the competiton’s sprinted past.

If you can keep her from stealing more than a few minutes or hours at a time, you're doing well. I know people who have let her have weeks, years - their whole lives, even.

Finally let's not forget that master contortionist, Indy Sision. Boy can he gum up the works! He's the one who keeps whispering in your ear, "Yes that looks right - but what if you’re wrong? Hadn't you better wait ‘til you're sure?"

Or "If I did this I'd get six of one, but if I did that I'd get half a dozen of the other - I can't decide." Or the real clincher - "If I leave it another week something will happen to make the decision easier."

Sure - someone else walks off with the account or the girl or the bargain or whatever it was you were indecisive about. And then isn't it amazing how clearly you can see what you should have done? Crystal clear, you were just in time to be too late.

So how do you deal with this tribe of monkeys on your back? The only way is eternal vigilance. Let your guard down and they grab the controls.

With a daily to-do list you can keep track of your activities - but make sure everything is on the list, in priority.

Though of course our friend Prue can turn writing a to-do list into an art form. So keep checking. Right now are you doing what is most productive with your life? (Of course at the moment you're reading this newspaper which I can assure you is a most virtuous, highly productive activity.)

ray@ebeatty.com

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

China Dictates Entertainment

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday November 11, 2011

There are certain advantages to dictatorship. Take China, where authorities have instructed TV stations to sharply cut back on shows that are "overly entertaining and of low taste," according to a spokesman with China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television last week.

When we look at the hit list and see dating shows, talent contests, talk shows and reality shows, we have to register some sympathy. There are a couple of quiz and reality shows here which would not be missed if dropped into the China Sea.

The statement said, “A number of entertainment programs are simple reproductions of other popular shows and some have tried to attract audiences through vulgar content such as gossip and exposure of privacy”. Well that does sound familiar.

I’ve found that many Australians still don’t understand how big and modern China is. Did you know the country has 34 satellite channels at the centre of a vast media network? The stations will be limited to broadcasting two “entertaining” programs each week, with a maximum of 90 minutes every day between 7:30 pm and 10:00 pm.

But one part of the statement spells problems for advertisers: "All broadcasting, TV and relevant organizations are not allowed to conduct ratings rankings.” So how do you evaluate a program without ratings?

Well for a start, commercials will increase in cost as marketers chase a smaller number of popular shows.

Just this week the bids were in for advertising on China Central Television, the country’s national broadcaster. The system is, you bid for ad spots for the coming 2012 year. In recent times, the prices have increased by double digit percentages each year. Last year advertisers pledged nearly two billion dollars.

The audiences are big, and so are the rates. A thirty second spot on a good show can cost $60,000. Come to think of it, on a per capita basis, that could be a lot cheaper than Australia.

In the bidding are multi-nationals like KFC and Kraft, and the big media buyers like Starcom MediaVest Group and Aegis Media’s Carat.

London-based Aegis is one of the world’s biggest media agencies, turning over $1.5 billion a year. Just last year Australia’s Harold Mitchell merged his Mitchell media group into the organisation making him their second-biggest shareholder and a member of the international board.

These days business success is so much harder if you don’t have solid ties to China, so all the big advertising agencies are there and many are flourishing.

The analysts do see some positives come out of the new regulations. For one thing, the stations may be forced to produce more quality programming rather than endless copies of copies of overseas shows.

The directive specifies scripted programmes, concerts, events and quiz shows that rely on knowledge rather than pure luck.

Of course in China the political cadres are never far away. A Chinese ‘Idol’ type of show was enormously popular with the singers attracting audiences of 400 million, when all of a sudden the plug was pulled and the mikes went dead.

It was found to be too entertaining, though speculation said the real reason was that the popular voting for winners was a bit too close to democracy for the Party’s liking.

There are difficult choices for Chinese authorities, if people watched less TV they might do more blogging or tweeting - much harder to control.

As an example of popular tastes, a year ago a Japanese porn star called Sora Aoi went to Shanghai and opened her microblogging account. Within a day she had 220,000 followers and now she is a celebrated personality - a sort of Kim Kardashian of the Middle Kingdom.

Is that what the authorities envisaged?

ray@ebeatty.com

Remember the Eskimos, Arabs and Australians?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday, November 4, 2011

Long ago the three jokes in marketing were: selling ice cream to Eskimos; selling sand to Saudi Arabia; and selling water in bottles.

Well Eskimo ice cream really does exist. Mind you it’s made from fish, reindeer fat, berries and seal oil so it must be an acquired taste.

Perth’s GMA Garnet really does sell sand to Saudi Arabia. It’s a special alluvial sand used in sand blasting, but that’s still a great sales tale.

As for water in bottles - well we’re all drinking it now aren’t we? And who would have thought it a few years back?

As a kid on European holidays I drank bottled water - because, they told me, the local water was not suitable for drinking: “aqua non potabile” said all the taps on Italian trains.

But back home everybody praised the purity and taste of our water. Here in Melbourne the Board of Works boasted the finest water in the world straight out of our taps.

So what has changed to turn bottled water into a $500 million industry, and discarded plastic containers into an ecological problem?

The main driver has been health consciousness. We need to drink more water, say the health and beauty articles. We should drink less sugar water, the plain is best. It’s the slimmest drink there is.

Add to this our changing climate. As the planet gets hotter and our summers seem to get ever longer, our drink consumption soars. The growth of the gym and running movement contributes. Did you see how many water bottles get drunk and discarded during a marathon or bicycle tour?

The past two decades have also seen some very sophisticated advertising to put a gloss on a very plain product. It is the perfect example of how to transfer personality to a product that has absolutely zero to start with.

The French do it beautifully as you’d expect. The Perrier commercial that showed water surging up from the bowels of the earth; more recently a girl walking through a summer day so hot that the cars are melting in the street.

Evian have created commercials that get remembered after just one viewing - in fact their “Roller Babies” are a top pick on YouTube. Locally Mt Franklin has featured children playing in water, while Hepburn Spa paints a historic picture of Captain Hepburn.

All very little to do with the reality of huge production lines filling millions of plastic bottles, often with filtered tap water.

There’s an illogical side too. The hatred for the plastic bottles - so much so that the town of Bundanoon in NSW has banned all bottled water. So has the University of Canberra and just recently the Victorian College of the Arts. No doubt more will follow, with the first school - Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney - showing the way.

I’m afraid the logic of a bottle of water being sinful while a bottle of Coke is not, escapes me. The difference is a spoonful of sugar. But you see no protests against Mother or Red Bull, with much less savoury reputations.

The industry is taking this seriously. Just last month Coca Cola Amatil loudly announced that it is moving Mt Franklin water into new, eco-friendly bottles that use 35% less plastic and won the environmental award from the Australian Packaging Covenant. This is a joint body between governments and industry to reduce and recycle packaging in products.

Of course there is nothing to stop people from bringing along their own bottles and filling them from the tap. But for the fashion conscious this is as appealing as fish-flavoured ice cream.

ray@ebeatty.com

For marketing the future’s on the wall

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 28, 2011

The new world of marketing is on the wall. The subway wall.

We are being hit by profound changes and five years from now your business will have to have adapted or face extinction. You’re in a fight for the survival of the fittest.

I don’t have to tell you how rapidly business, media and leisure are changing. It’s as if every day we discover something new we didn’t know existed, and have to change our behaviour.

From booking tickets for the movies to buying a book, from visiting the bank to checking the encyclopaedia, from filling a government form to applying for a job. We do things differently now, and the changes will come faster.

The accelerator will be the National Broadband Network.

Now that it is getting over its stuttering start, we will see it spread like oil on a pond. Already the navvies with their orange jackets and blue cables are appearing on corners in every state.

Let me give you an example of what could happen.

Two months ago in Seoul, South Korea, commuters discovered that the walls of one of the busiest subway stations had been covered with illuminated pictures of shopping shelves. Row after row of cereal boxes and detergents and soup packets, just like in a real supermarket.

Above the displays were the instructions. Use the application on your smart phone (if you haven’t got it, call this number and it will be instantly inserted). With the phone’s camera, take a photo of the QR code on whatever product you want.

Oh that’s a Quick Response code. The funny square dots that keep appearing on products and newspapers and look like a bar code on steroids. Which is precisely what they are.

They link your smartphone into the web and exchange information. One snap and you have just bought that item.

Walk the length of the wall and its pillars with shopping list in one hand and phone in the other, clicking off the week’s groceries. By the time the train gets you home, the order is already with the supermarket, being picked and packed for delivery.

The Koreans have the world’s fastest and biggest national broadband network, are the biggest consumers of smartphones, the highest users of QR codes. So they are leading the world in this new technology. Have no doubt about it, we will be following the same road.

Just this week our sister newspaper The Australian questioned 15 of the country’s leading advertising buyers about the opportunities that will come from the NBN. All agreed that they will be considerable.

They counted off internet television and movies, online e-commerce like Korea’s, better information delivery and feedback, greater connectivity with country areas.

“There’s a million opportunities,” said Aegis Media chairman Harold Mitchell.

“Speed will accelerate changes in retail behaviour...and open the door for new models,” says Mindshare Australia’s James Greet.

“Any brands enabled...to build deeper relationships through content and genuine dialogue will win,” adds OMD’s Peter Horgan.

And MEC’s Peter Fogel concluded: “The brands that will win are those able to attract and engage consumers more often and for longer periods of time”.

In other words, your relationship with your customers will be closer, faster, more intimate. You will know them better - but in turn they will know you better.

This is an opportunity to develop a real dialogue with your customers, like speaking to each of them face to face in your office or shop. The combination of fast broadband and smartphones gives you that interaction any time, any place.

What a brave new world we are stepping into. How ready are you to cope with it?

ray@ebeatty.com

Don’t trifle with the male shopper

Melbourne Herald Sun, October 21, 2011

The advertising brief was simple - write a TV commercial launching new Foster Clark’s Instant Trifle, and show how easily a trifle could be made thanks to fast-setting custard and jelly.

My idea was, “it’s so easy that even dad and the kids can make it”. So I wrote a script where mum is out on Saturday morning and the family decide to give her a treat - make the dessert themselves. Quick cuts show ingredients prepared, end with look of delight on mum’s face when she arrives to a lovely trifle and beaming hubby and kids.

Nothing offensive or contentious? So I thought until the storyboard went in for consumer testing. It came out shredded.

Mums regarded the kitchen as their territory and did not want the family in there without them. The response was, “they’d only make a mess and I’d have to clean up after them” or “there’s no way my husband would do any cooking himself” - the script was spiked and we went back to pretty pictures of tempting desserts.

Now this all happened some 30 years ago. How the world has changed since the 80s. But just how different is it really?

One thing research can measure is the gender of grocery buying. We all know, visiting our supermarket, that there are more men pushing trolleys than in the past, The amount of food in the basket shows there is a family to feed.

To get figures, I asked Geoffrey Smith, Industry Director for Retail at Morgan Research in Sydney. They continually survey Australian trends, questioning 16,000 people a year.

“From 1997 to 2003, the number of male grocery buyers rose from 35% to 40%,” he explained. “But then it flatlined, stayed at 40% right up to 2011. And we don’t know why, really.” Obviously men have hit their supermarket ceiling.

The change has worked both ways. Women supermarket buyers fell five percent between 67 and 02, and have remained at sixty percent ever since.

Still, four out of ten men is a sizable number - not that you would notice it in TV advertising. In most commercials it’s still mum who pushes the trolley, cleans the toilet, cooks the dinner, as it has always been.

In most of the advertising world, the only time we see a man in a supermarket it is as a bewildered twerp.

Boyfriend is sent to the supermarket to buy one item - but then forgets the brand. However then he sees a girl bending down at the dairy counter, ogles the bareness at the top of her jeans, notices she has a black thong. Aha - Black Swan dips!

In a Keloggs Crunchy Nut commercial a young couple take a romantic balloon ride, but when they urgently need altitude, they jettison all their possessions. The final item is the pack of cereal. Cut to girl enjoying her breakfast, and boyfriend tossed far below.

There’s also a belief that men know nothing about periods. Recently a commercial for Libra showed boyfriend playing with a box of pads, sticking them on his arms and head, pretending to be a robot - till girlfriend and her parents walk through the door.

Now presumably such an expensive ad by a major company would have been solidly market researched before being made. Which leaves me scratching my head - what exactly do our Gen X and Y girls think about the men in their lives, and their own menstruation, that it can be such a joke? To understand I’d have to be much younger - and female.

However marketers had better start understanding that the nowadays the market is both male and female - almost equally.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Goodbye Steve, and thanks

Melbourne Herald Sun, October 14, 2011

A million words have been written and spoken since last week’s death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. But how could I not acknowledge the passing of this column’s idol, the greatest Marketeer of all?

More specifically, let’s take a look at what Jobs can teach you about your business. What did he get so right, so consistently?

Back when he started as a 21 year old in his family garage, he had marketing in mind.

Looking at the interest of geeky hobbyists for self-constructed kit computers, he could see a market for a real personal computer. He did the marketing, and brought his friend Steve Wozniak - a real electronic hacker - into a partnership to do the designing and programming. They built the Apple II.

Always Jobs insisted on simplicity of use. And a great deal of the Apple II’s success was achieved by tramping into the schools of America, and later the world, promoting it as an ideal educational tool. The kids could quickly get up and running without having to learn programming first.

There was another advantage to this marketing strategy: get them young and you’ll keep them for ever.

Then came the Macintosh, the computer that transformed how we all communicate. From Xerox he took the GUI graphic interface, from Stanford Research Institute, the mouse. All aimed at making computers simple, tactile to use, hiding the immense complexity within.

The fresh marketing drive aimed at the visual industry. Designers, advertising agencies, newspapers, architects - who also happened to be the opinion leaders in what is new and trendy.

Then came his decade in the wilderness. He could never see why everybody was not like him - driven, perfectionist, creative, demanding - which made him a terrible boss. In 1985 the board, made up of more conventional, button-down men, voted to effectively push him out.

Undaunted he formed a new computer company, NeXT. By 1997 Apple realised that they needed their dictator and bought NeXT. Jobs was back in the saddle.

Now began the greatest marketing tour de force we’ve ever seen. First came the iMac. Who would ever want a strange, coloured, transparent computer? Answer: everyone.

Jobs knew that marketing is about creating desire. He didn’t just get an engineer to design his products, he made the brilliant English artist Jonathan Ive his Senior Vice President of Industrial Design.

Ive conceived the off-the-planet iMac, and then the MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad. In other words, everything that makes an Apple an Apple.

Jobs understood image. Look at his advertising. An Apple commercial is unmistakably Apple. Smart, slick, clean, just like the products.

To market his iPods, Jobs created iTunes and before long became the kingpin of the music industry.

For the iPhone he created the Apps market - where other people did all the work.

His showmanship was legendary. All the secrecy behind new Apple products, right up to the moment when Jobs would stride onto a stage and unveil the new invention like a rabbit from a hat.

Also dazzling was his ability to generate waves of publicity for his products. Think of all the hype over the iPad. Five years before, Bill Gates had introduced his tablet computer as “the next great thing in computing.” He was right, but smart as he is, he just did not have the chutzpah that Jobs could bring to launching the product.

What were Jobs’ secrets? Brilliant concepts. Willingness to pay for the very best people and designers. A sense of timing. Persistence. And the one thing you may find difficult to learn: sheer genius.

Goodbye Steve, thanks for all the music.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Bad rep? Call Web Dusters!

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday October 7,2011

What do you do when you’re browsing through Google, checking yourself out as you like to do every now and then, and you discover that someone has written something about you, or your company, that is untrue. Or even worse, that is true but you didn’t want anyone to know?

What do you do? You call Web Dusters!

Well that’s my name for them. They call themselves “Reputation Defenders” or “Online Reputation Managers”. These are companies you hire, either per task or on retainer, who look out for nasties in the woodpile.

It can be a pretty big woodpile, too. It’s not unusual for a medium-sized company to come up with a few million references when they’re searched for on Google or Bing.

The Web Dusters vacuum their way through this and winkle out unappealing references.

Of course this is a labour of Sisyphus - the bloke who spends eternity pushing a boulder uphill every day, only for it to roll down every night. It’s a job without end.

The dusting reaches far and wide. Wikipedia is a huge reference where a person or company can be misunderstood. It’s nice to be in an encyclopaedia, but not if the reference points out wrongful or unflattering events.

Even worse, Wikileaks waits for any secret tit-bit to slip into its grasp. And we all know what a hard time that has given the world’s governments.

Two years ago a YouTube video showed two Domino’s Pizza employees doing gross things to their pizzas in the back room. It was a sensation viewed around the globe and the couple was actually prosecuted. But not before it had done millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the company’s sales.

Reputation Manager Australia is a local company that offers its watchdog services. They give the example of a web search on a businessman who quickly became their client.

The search of his name had brought up, in the first three responses, a reference to an ASIC investigation report. It was harsh and recounted the agency’s prosecution of him, leading to his being banned for a time.

Owner David Cannell boasts that he was able to push the client’s reference down the queue to oblivion.

Another rich vein of business is our sporting world. Working with sports clubs, he has ways to keep their champions’ antics out of the public eye.

Of course there is also a do-it-yourself element in the black-blogging trade. Company staff are encouraged to write glowing reviews about their restaurant or hotel - incognito of course. And then they go on their opponents’ sites and complain about bad food and poor service.

These too can be dusted out.

But you have to be careful not to get caught. Recently the PR goliath Burson-Marsteller was sprung when they were asked by client Facebook to do a little internet spying on their rival Google. Unfortunately whoever was given the task asked the wrong person. He turned out to be a whistle-blower who blasted the story across the web.

Mind you, considering that the US online advertising market is now worth $28 billion, you can understand a little frisky competition.

There is now official interest in all this skullduggery. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission prosecuted a PR company, Reverb Communications. They had a side business writing glowing reviews on video games, and charging the developer for the service.

The FTC slapped the company on the hand and warned everybody else not to post fraudulent reviews, either for themselves or for their opponents. No doubt the industry looked up from their monitors, nodded acknowledgement, and went back to writing reviews.

Call out the Web Dusters!

ray@ebeatty.com

Cash bells ring for the marriage market

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 30, 2011


If your business has been running a bit slow in its profits or growth, maybe you ought to look at marriage.

No, I cast no aspersions on your current relationship - rather, the money to be made out of splicing the knot.

Marriage seems to be one of the armour-plated, recession-proof products in this world and believe it or not, Australians are marrying more than ever - with ever-increasing cost.

This year 119,000 Australian couples will tread the aisle, a percentage point up from last year. Historically the marriage rate has been steadily falling, so any increase is a surprise.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics records the current annual marriage rate at 5.5 per thousand population. In the seventies it was close to eight. The record was set in 1942 when it hit 12. Mind you they had good reason to be in a hurry.

Today’s couples are much older than in the past. The median age is now 32 for men and 29 for women, whereas in the seventies they married five or six years earlier.

Is this the sign of new wisdom and maturity? Certainly they have had time to develop careers, their incomes and savings. So when it comes to the wedding, they splurge.

Researchers have placed the average cost of a wedding at $36,000. And much of the money seems to come from the savings of the couple. Manager of the research group IBISWorld, Karen Dobie, pointed to couples regarding the wedding as “A high priority expense”.

Couples save for a long time, tightening their belts to raise the bank balance, and no doubt doing their waistlines no harm either.

Each Saturday as you pass your local church, think about the cost of those gowns and flashy cars. This is a $4.3 billion industry.

The biggest winners are the hotels and reception palaces that rake in $1.4 billion of the takings. And that does not include the food which brings in another $670 million. Flowers also generate a hefty $760 million. All these categories are expected to grow by more than 10 per cent in the coming five years.

Photography and film production is the only category not doing so well. No doubt it’s because of so many friends and uncles offering to film the event with their newly-acquired expensive equipment. Mind you, seeing some of the results of these efforts makes me think that the prudent couples will double-up by hiring a professional too.

Of course, who could forget the wedding dress. Now you don’t have to buy the world’s most expensive - that record is currently held by Renee Strauss who created a dress with 150 carats of diamonds, valued at $12 million.

But possibly if you are the father of the bride, you may feel that hers is not so far behind. Especially when you throw in the bridesmaids’ custom-designed frocks and the groomsmen’s Armani dinner suits. At the end of the year you are looking at close to a billion dollars spent on clothes.

Progress is effecting printers too, as more invitations are done by email, with DVDs replacing the mountains of photo sets sent to the guests.

However there is another ray of light in this story, for the wedding industry. Around the world a whole new gold rush is evolving. From Argentina to Sweden, from Canada to South Africa, the phenomenon of same sex marriage is spreading.

And when gay couples pledge their troths, you’ll usually find a high-income couple, older and wealthier, surrounded by friends who insist that this must be the best bash since Princess Di.

Ah, there’s a whole industry here waiting with bated breath for our legislators to get in on the act and give gay marriage a go.

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Fred Schepisi and the art of storming through

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 23, 2011

Last weekend we saw a wonderful movie, The Eye of the Storm, Fred Schepisi’s interpretation of Patrick White’s novel starring Charlotte Rampling and Geoffrey Rush. And it set me off thinking about advertising creativity.

I remembered, as a junior writer in one of the big agencies, when Fred learned the film business through making TV commercials.

In the agency we would meticulously hone the script, each word and visual hammered out between the creatives and the clients, till we had a script - dry and typical of a committee effort.

Fred would be called in, as the hottest young director in the country, and be drilled about the requirements word for word.

Then he would disappear. No thanks, he didn’t want the agency or the client at the shoot or edit. The first thing we saw was the rough cut, when the commercial was 95 per cent made.

Client and agency would gather in the darkened boardroom to view. Surprise - the film seemed to have little connection to our careful script. The voice-over had been cut from fifty words to five. He at least allowed us to see a pack shot at the end.

Anyone from client or agency who objected was met by a torrent of expletives from the director, who then asked: “Is this better than you wanted?” And we all had to agree, it was brilliant. He had captured the real meaning of what we wanted to say and delivered a powerful message for the product.

He was quite unreasonable in ignoring agency protocols. But as I quoted in last week’s column, “All progress depends on unreasonable people”.

One of the greatest ad men of recent times, Britain’s David Abbott, built his agency AMV-BBDO through outstanding creative work. He showed how to turn the slowness of Guiness pouring into a virtue, and even made a supermarket classy through his Sainsbury’s ads (alas a feat that has never been emulated here).

In the process he made his millions, but refused to compromise. As he recently said in an interview with American adman Rance Crain, “Most of the talk in the advertising business is about clients picking agencies. I think it's just as important for agencies to pick clients."

He wanted clients who respected and listened to him. "Every client we picked and agreed to work with - it was not only that we wanted their money, but we wanted their company as well. We chose people we liked, for whom advertising seemed to be an important, upfront part of their business."

This was the philosophy that made The Campaign Palace a success, first in Melbourne and then also in Sydney. Founders Lionel Hunt and Gordon Trembath made a reputation for not compromising on the creativity. So they needed clients who would trust them.

The ads they made were risky. “Some day you’re gonna get caught with your pants down” showed Dunlop’s Pacific Brands that saucy ads could attract the public’s attention far greater than the media spend available.

The ads that followed like “I’m wearing No Nickers” and “Antz Pantz (sic ‘em Rex!)” proved the point.

In the early years clients like Just Jeans and P&O (“Heron Island - Just a drop in the ocean”) were successful because people remembered the ads.

Says Trembath: “If you're clearly presenting memorable uncompromised work that's so obviously going to brand that client a hero, you're going to be loved forever for your uncompromising stance."

However the hard part is getting to that point of trust.

Once you’re as famous as Schepisi or Abbott or Palace, you can persuade the clients that bending to your will is going to make them rich and famous.

But until then the major job to be done is selling yourself.


ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Gutenberg: death of an unreasonable man

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 16, 2011

One of the most important men in modern history died last week and nobody seemed to notice. There were no stop-press headlines around the world, no chance of a burial at Arlington Cemetery, only a whisper around the web and a few newspaper obituaries.

Yet Michael S. Hart has changed the world, education and business forever. He also changed your life and the way you look at, and use, knowledge.

Forty years ago he created Project Gutenberg and in the process invented the ebook. If you don’t know what Project Gutenberg is, you should, so keep reading.

Hart invented it on July 4, 1971, after returning from the fireworks with a hand-out copy of the US Declaration of Independence. He was working with computers at the University of Illinois and typed the document as a computer file which his friends could access and share, on an early academic version of the internet.

Then he had his insane idea. Let’s put every book ever written, in whatever language, onto one huge world database. In honour of the genius who transformed the world through the invention of movable type, he named his project after Johannes Gutenberg.

For more than two decades he did most of the work himself, starting with the likes of the US Bill of Rights, the King James Bible and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Painstakingly copying 20 books a year, by 1987 he had 313 books on the database.

Then help finally came. Through the magic of the rapidly expanding internet, thousands of contributors volunteered. Scanners changed the task from typing word by word, to editing the OCR files.

Today there are more than 36,000 books in 60 languages. They are in the public domain and available free to anyone anywhere. So a Uigur in western China can read the 2010 CIA World Factbook; Austen, Dickens and Joyce are all available, and the current favourite - no surprise - is The Kama Sutra.

There would be a lot more, but the publishing industry has lobbied hard to extend copyright. In 2006, under the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, coverage was increased from 50 years to 70 years.

Hart disagreed: "One thing about ebooks that most people haven't thought much, is that ebooks are the very first thing that we're all able to have as much as we want other than air.”

His ideas sparked the revolution that is happening continuously, right round us. Think how much you rely on the web for your daily work and information. The collapse of our biggest bookstores, the screws that internet marketing is putting on retailers.

Hart’s concept led to other great inventions. How many times do you use Wikipedia in a week? Jimmy Wales created it only ten years ago but already it has 13 million unique visitors every day. Its breadth and coverage dwarfs the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It has 19 million articles in 270 languages. How many bookshelves would that take?

How we value knowledge has also changed. Gutenberg doesn’t charge for the downloads. If it did, Hart would have become a multi-millionaire like the Gates, Jobs and Dells of the computer revolution. Instead he lived frugally, fixing his own house and car and building computers from second-hand parts.

For 40 years he stayed focussed on his mission: the spread of literature, learning, knowledge to everyone who cared to reach out and pluck it.

He was fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw: "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

Michael S. Hart died as unreasonable as ever, and the world needs more like him.

ray@ebeatty.com

Do you side with the yeas or the nays?

Melbourne Herald Sun, September 9, 2011

In my experience the world divides into two camps: the nay-sayers and the yea-sayers . Which one are you in?

You know a lot of nay-sayers. You may be one, or be married to one, you will certainly work with one somewhere in your life, you’ll immediately know what I mean.

The nay-sayer automatically answers “nay”.
“Let’s go out tonight!”
“No.”
“Do you like my new product idea?”
“No.”
“Give us a kiss.”
“Not tonight.”

With a nay-sayer you have to learn strategy. Never rush them for an answer, never thrust an idea at them, let them come round to it.
“Would you like a chocolate?”
“No.” Then later: “Well maybe just one.”

You learn to telegraph ideas in advance, preferably let them think it was their idea in the first place. Which works fine, but can be very cramping to spontaneity. They don’t get swept off their feet, their hooves are firmly dug into the soil.

On the other side is the yea-sayer, you’ll know many of these too.
“Fancy a movie?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
“Ok.”
“What do you think of this product?”
“Let’s put it on the shelf and see if it sells.”
“No-one seems interested in that house.”
“So put in a bid and see if we can get it cheap.”

The yea-sayer will instinctively jump into things feet first. But it also means they can land in hot water or worse, it doesn’t always pay to leap before you look.

I’ve been on the yea side all my life and it has cost me a lot of money. Great ideas that seemed so certain and ended when I ran out of money before the idea actually made any. If you’re in business you’ll have experienced that at some stage. It comes with the territory.

But on the other hand there have been opportunities and successes that would never have happened had I waited and held back till I was sure they were safe. Someone else would have jumped in before I made up my mind.

The smart, successful yea-sayers combine careful attention and judgement with a fearless reaction speed, so when a good idea comes along they can recognise it and grab it fast. Of course it also helps to have a bit of luck.

The nay-sayer is conservative, protective, adverse to risk. In business this is a fine, reliable position to take. But once changes start to happen in the market - the constant change in the public’s likes and dislikes, even whole generational changes - trouble hits.

Look at the loss of our beautiful bookshops. The shops didn’t change, the public did.

Mobile communications, e-books, internet, eBay, iTunes - the whole market changed but Borders would still have been familiar to Mr Pickwick.

Now our retailers are finding that their competition is not just across the street but coming from California or Milan or Bangalore. They can’t sit back and say nay, they have to find new strategies and be willing to try products or sales methods that will severely rumple their comfort zones.

Sometimes the yea-sayer can have wonderful results come out of their willingness to risk.

“I’ve got tickets to a show but I’ve got nobody to go with.”
“Let me fix you up with a blind date.”
Pause. Yea or nay? Risk an evening with someone you won’t like, or take the chance?
“Ok, set it up if you can.”

The last time I made that decision I ended up being married for 20 years, so be warned - the consequences can be very long term.


ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Advertising for free: the Top Ten Virtual Videos

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday September 2, 2011.

In the advertising business the two most frequent sentences you hear are: “I need a big advertising campaign” followed by, “But we don’t have much money to spend”.

You try to explain that any advertising costs lots of money, but then the client wonders what’s your worth if you can’t fix a little matter like that.

Which is why I’m fascinated by viral advertising. After all if you hit the right buttons, you can win millions of viewers. They do much more than notice your commercial on TV - they have had it recommended, selected the web site, found the ad and then elected to watch it - usually a couple of minutes long.

A Boston company called Visible Data specialises in measuring and recording the top choices in video sites like Youtube and puts out regular hit parades. Now they have published the Top Ten Viral Videos of All Time, together with US trade publication Advertising Age.

So far there are only two ads which have achieved over 100,000,000 views. You have probably been sent the links by your friends already.

Blendtec makes a high powered kitchen blender which its inventor, Tom Dickson, demonstrates by blending - unusual things. These productions, cheaply filmed, are called Will It Blend and the objects have included mobile phones, Nike sneakers, broomsticks, SLR cameras - so far 107 videos with the latest featuring a Justin Bieber doll and CD.

Do they work? To date they have been viewed 170 million times and Dickson claimed: “Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.”

Another one you’ll have seen is the break-dancing babies spot by Evian Water. This was an expensive technical production with its mixture of live babies and digital animation, but the company has received 158 million free peeks.

I’ve already written about Old Spice and their handsome hunk who tells the ladies that while their partner may never look like him, he can smell like him. Now into its third campaign, the ads have generated over 180 million views, not counting the free air time they received on news shows. All three campaigns made the top 10.

Other top views are VW Passat’s The Force at 60,000,000; DC Shoes with nine minutes of manic driving by Ken Block, watched by 60 million petrolheads.

The incredible motion-sensing powers of the Xbox 360 have fascinated 54 million viewers, while a Doritos commercial set in a church funeral was actually made by the Mosaic Church of Los Angeles and scored 47 million.

You can also spend a squillion on your commercial, like the 2004 Pepsi Gladiators - We Will Rock You which starred Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyonce Knowles as the warrior amazons and Enrique Iglesias as the Roman emperor.

That would have had the budget of a small movie, complete with a Colosseum stage set and very skimpy armour for the girls. Seven years later it’s still on the web, having clocked up 53 million hits.

The point is that it’s not the amount of money you spend on the commercial - it’s the cleverness of the idea behind it. What these winners have is wit, originality and charm. So a tabletop with the client using his food processor can be more watchable than a team of magastars on a million-dollar set.

Australians haven’t been left behind in all this. While we currently don’t have the huge successes generated by CUB’s Big Ad five years ago, there is still some local content.

An “investigation” made by two guys and a cameraman, showed how easy it is to get into Sydney clubs, for free, if you look like a DJ. It’s three minutes long and the sponsor Sprite only gets a look-in at the opening and closing titles. But it did clock up a million.

ray@ebeatty.com

Make sure your brand is well backed up

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 26, 2011
We all know brand advocates. Apple has built a billion-dollar industry out of them, those annoying friends who can’t hold back from showing you their latest iPhone app or iPad game that they are convinced are life-sustaining possessions - they’d be dead without them.

Another company built on fanatics is Harley-Davidson. Here I’m not talking about the Hell’s Angels but the city stockbrokers and suburban businessmen who relive their Marlon Brando fantasies, leather jacket and all (even though they now look like the Brando in his later years).

It’s not just boys and toys either. I remember some years ago when the passion for Clinique non-allergenic cosmetics swept the consciousness of our well-heeled eleganzia. I would blink at the prices of my wife’s purchases: “They charge this much because there’s nothing in them?”

The brand advocate can do much of your marketing job for you, at a fraction of the cost of advertising campaigns.

There’s still word of mouth in the coffee room or supermarket aisle, but these days the reach is so much wider. There’s word of twitter and word of Facebook, endless mobile phone conversations, so now there’s no reason why the advocate ever needs to stop talking.

But they have to be given ammunition. This is where you come in. They want to be in the know, to be that step ahead, so they can lord it over their followers.

Clubs and support groups are so much easier these days with web sites and Facebook pages. Those who are true believers will lap up any information you can provide. So the smart marketers will leak just enough information to incite curiosity and excitement.

Once more, look upon the master’s example: Steve Jobs can squeeze out information on his new product drop by drop till his masses are salivating and queuing up at the Apple store.

You probably have less resources than Jobs, but a lot can be achieved through sampling. Give your product to the key advocates and let them try it out and spread the word.

Ah but where do you find these devotees? Well start by following the social sites, put out questionnaires periodically, rummage through the guarantee cards.

Give someone the task of maintaining a positive engagement with these fans. Newsletters, tweets, Facebook entries, shopping centre presentations - they are all time-consuming.

Make the process a two-way street. Listen to their whinges and complaints, and let them know you’re listening. Silence is the greatest killer of relationships.

Software companies are notorious for this. They put out a new release and leave it there for six months or more as the bugs and complaints emerge, unanswered. Then they will release version X.1 with many of the problems fixed - but meanwhile the users have turned elsewhere.

How much easier to say, “We know about your problems in these areas and are working on them, they will be fixed in our new service pack release”.

Which brings up the point: stop selling, rather converse and engage.

Too many companies treat their web sites and Facebook pages like electronic brochures. They should be more involving and allow the customer to feel that there is someone out there listening. Apart from anything else this can be very cheap and efficient market research.

With new products, while it’s important to keep up the excitement and expectations, in the long run you should aim to under promise and over deliver. Cause the other way round can be disastrous.

If your advocate receives their sample and then discovers something more than they expected, you can be sure it will be quickly communicated all down the line.

So treasure your brand advocates, inform and reward them. The returns will be far greater than the cost, they can even be the difference between success and failure for a brand.

ray@ebeatty.com;

The most boring place on earth

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 19, 2011

It’s amazing how different things look from the other side of the world. I’m currently in Italy - hot mid-summer, but even with the holidays Europe is in turmoil.

Every bar has a torrent of news coming off the big LCD screens and it never seems to be good. Politicians scurry from meeting to meeting followed by swarms of camera crews.

The Greeks have been virtually written off and now the serious talk is should they jump or will they need to be pushed.

Italy is not far behind in the economic stakes, their politicians are also dashing from conference to crisis meeting and now it’s started affecting France.

President Obama is caught in a gridlock and even the shock therapy of the AAA downgrade is not enough to move the Tea Party, who New York Times columnists have compared to self-destroying terrorists.

In all this turmoil, in all the 24 hour news broadcasts, there is never a word about Australia. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we don’t even exist.

There are no reports of the Australian Stock Exchange, our dollar is never mentioned, our politicians never get a look in.

And no wonder. We’re so boring, we just don’t rate on their seismic scales. We’re not about to default, our currency and credit rating are not in trouble, we don’t have a deficit that’s bigger than our GDP.

Our cities aren’t being burned down by disaffected youths and while there are always cries that unemployment is too high, ours is half of anyone else’s.

Our politicians are so boring too. Here in Italy with Berlusconi you have a string of corruption allegations, sex and scandal. But back in Australia I don’t think we could picture a bunga bunga party in the Lodge. Let’s pause that a minute... No, can’t picture it.

Where Republicans, Democrats and President are tearing each other apart in Washington and the knives are being sharpened in the Roman forum, all we have to look forward to is whether the PM or Tony Abbott will score more points in today’s schoolyard debating scraps.

History seems determined to keep us out of the news. I’ve been working on the report of a recent conference called Future Fuels for Australia, at the University of Queensland. Delegates pointed out that with the world already at “peak oil”, there is a frantic search for alternatives.

Biofuels are already here and growing, literally, as ethanol.

Liquid fuels will have to be extracted from coal – and guess who has some of the world’s greatest coal deposits? The Northern Territory has vast shale gas fields which will give up enough gas, to be turned into liquid, for a couple of centuries.

When you see Europeans paying two dollars a litre for petrol, it’s obvious that new technology is going to come galloping in.

We finally have a Carbon Tax coming, to finance development. It will even put money on the table to finance solar, wind and thermal projects. Though we have enough heat and wind already: turn on the nightly news.

Then there is the whole world’s most unsolvable problem: immigration.

Now I don’t want to get religious here but God gave us a dirty great moat which acts as an effective filter. Some Italian friends asked how bad was our illegal migrant problem? Gravely I replied “6000 last year”, with which they burst out laughing. “We’ve had that many in a day!”

On the other side of the world, it’s very difficult to impress the natives when you come from the most boring land on earth.


ray@ebeatty.com

The day Deep Throat called to open up

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday August 12, 2011.


“Good morning, Washington Post”
“Bob Woodward please”
“Sorry he’s out, can I take a message?”
“It’s private, I can only talk to him, what’s his mobile?”
“Sorry we don’t give out mobile numbers.”
“His email then?”
“Nor email. What is your name?”
“Tell him Deep Throat called, but not to worry, I’ll call the New York Times.”

All right, so they didn’t have mobiles or email in the days of Watergate, but you can still see this scenario happening in today’s offices. Maybe there is an important, life-changing call looking for you, that can’t get past the gate keepers.

I had this argument the other day, with a young reporter who does not allow the switchboard to give out his mobile number.

“So what sort of journalist does that make you?” I snapped. “Journalists always have to have their antennas out, listen to everyone, know what’s going on. If you close off your lines of communication you’re a fool.”

But I’ll say this applies to my readers too. My first advice is, even when you get a job with a corporation that issues you with a phone and email address - don’t give up your own private ones.

As much as possible, when you deal with customers and suppliers, give them your personal details to put in their address books.

The fact is, the average time most people will hold a job is less than three years. But I’m sure you expect your working lifetime to be much longer than that.

These days the phone and email are your identity. They are who you are, where people call you, how they can find you.

How often have you dealt regularly - every few months, say - with a company representative, and one day when you phone, they have gone.

Now this rep had grown to understand your business, you liked them and got on well together, you knew they could be trusted to charge you fairly. But the phone is cut off, the email bounces, to all intents and purposes they have disappeared off the planet. When you ask the switchboard, mysteriously nobody knows where they went.

This is when you wish you had their private contact details. Of course companies are well aware of this and they are very happy to bury their ex under a load of concrete.

They actively discourage personal contacts, so when you are passing on your true identity, you’ll have to be discreet and not let the boss notice.

What, you’re worried that your number will be passed to some huge Bangalore call centre? Certainly the world is full of spammers and nuisance callers. But they will rarely be the people you gave your number to. My ISP has an efficient spam-catcher and there is one in my Norton anti-virus so between them they weed out most of the Russian brides and Viagra sellers.

There will always be a number that sneak through, but it’s an easy enough task when you download your email to winkle them out at the start. Better to put up with that little bit of nuisance than to risk missing out on the one caller or message that could make all the difference to your career.

Oh and to put my money where my mouth is: my phone number is 0409 174 565 and my email is ray@ebeatty.com. Call me.

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Rebranding jihads or banks

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 29, 2011

Whether you’re marketing jihads or mortgages, so much depends on getting the name right.

Take Osama bin Laden. Towards the end he was struggling to come to terms with modern marketing. Like many a corporate CEO he had to weigh up the value of his brand, suffering as it was from the loss of key management people, decline in market-share, and too long between headline-grabbing atrocities.

As has been discovered from the computer-loads of documents and emails brought out of his Abbottabad lair, he was seriously thinking about re-branding and re-naming his franchise.

He was concerned that they were getting bad PR from killing too many Muslims rather than infidels, and the name al-Qaeda was losing its political and religious significance to the punters.

Even more concerning, his market was being attracted away by the exciting new people power revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Lybia. He had become old-hat and came to the conclusion that they needed a makeover.

My Arabic being non-existent I could give little assistance to the re-naming think tank. But I can certainly point to the importance of getting the name right.

Here in Australia we’ve just seen a classic example of how the wrong turn can lead you up a dead end.

In 1997 Westpac bought Bank of Melbourne at the time when all the little banks were being swallowed up. Seven years later, in a fit of corporate uniformity, then chief David Morgan dumped the Melbourne name and painted the whole show red.

Too many customers responded by going elsewhere, and Westpac never achieved that “Melbourneness” that it desired.

So now the rebranding is on again under another the new boss, Scott Tanner. This time all the St George branches in Victoria will become Bank of Melbourne. The process has already started, as you’ll notice next time you saunter down the high street.

The plan has been costed at $578 million. It’s a lot of money to take you back to where you started from.

But they have made lots of promises which Melburnians will watch with a skeptical eye. Within the next five years they will add 100 new branches, and 300 ATMs, they say.

There is also talk of their opening on Saturdays again, as the old BoM did in the past. Already they have set daily times at 9:30-5.00, five days a week.

Changing the brand and the corporate colours is never cheap and not always effective. In 1995 another new boss, Frank Blount, stamped his branding on his company, renaming Telecom Australia to Telstra.

Once again it was a mightily expensive exercise, millions of dollars. Just imagine replacing all the phone boxes for a start!

However he found himself in a hide-bound structure going back to the PMG’s Department and he needed the huge workforce to look at itself differently, and be willing to change. Maybe a change of name would make the old rose smell sweeter.

The Telecom empire was run by divisional war-lords who only towed the line if it pointed the way they wanted to go. The new image helped Blount to fight his new-broom skirmishes.

Much has changed in the past 16 years, not all to the good. But there is no denying that the modern Telstra has no resemblance to the old model of the past. There are benefits, there are losses, but looking back they seem to have been inevitable.

Such is the gamble you take with these huge organisations. Reality is, much of what goes on within the walls is outside senior management’s knowledge or control. So they fall back on a lick of paint and extended opening hours to show the public that something has really changed.

Let’s hope that Westpac’s changes work out - and that al-Qaeda’s don’t.


ray@ebeatty.com

Carramba! Does Spain have the answer to our rag trade pain?

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday July 22, 2011

A winter weekday in Bourke Street can be deathly quiet as shop assistants lean on the counters of fabulous department stores hoping for business. No wonder their managements are bewailing the drop in retail sales this past half year.

But wait a minute. One store is bustling with customers. Young and old, women and men, dart in, check out the racks, pick an item, try it and buy it. The card swipers hum with warmth as the transactions flow through.

Can it be? Ah yes. It’s Zara. The newly-opened store that proved from its first day that there’s nothing wrong with Australian retail that good products and marketing can’t fix.

Zara is smart marketing, nothing more. The designs are fresh, current - but not over the top. The manufacturing is good quality, both fabrics and finish, but nothing exotic.

The prices are: “Hmm I like this - and I can just afford it”. Not Swanston Street bargain basement, but not Collins Street boutique either. They fit comfortably within the paypacket’s disposable income segment.

Since he started in 1975, Amancio Ortega knew his customers intimately. He understood what they wanted, how much to charge, their desire for freshness and innovation - without theatrics. He now provides this to 5157 stores in 81 countries. And that’s not counting online.

But you don’t get the feeling that your item is off the production line. Zara make their garments in fairly small batches, for example 30,000 jackets with blazer buttons. By the time they have been divided between 5000 stores worldwide, you’re pretty safe to think that you won’t run into another one at tomorrow’s event.

Styles are changed quickly. Customers learn that if they don’t buy it now it won’t be there next week. This creates a “grab it while you have the chance” spirit in the store.

Staff are encouraged to report requests. There is a system that passes the information to their huge design section at company headquarters in Arteixo, north-west Spain.

Sometimes the choices find their own fame, like the $75 blue dress recently donned by Dutchess Kate and instantly flashed around the world. In fact Ms Middleton is very much the typical customer Zara are targeting. Or was, until a couple of months ago.

So what is it about our Spanish newcomer that causes other retailers so much grief? It’s certainly not million-dollar advertising campaigns. Most of what they have achieved in the past few months in Sydney and now Melbourne has worked through word of mouth. Which was enough to have crowds on the pavements waiting for the first opening day.

It’s not innovative design - a big world-wide complaint has been that they cherry-pick the best ideas of other designers and quickly created their own versions.

But speed is important. They can spot a trend and hit it quickly. What would take other designers half a year, they get done in two months. Draw up a design, find the fabric, cut, sew, and put it out into the supply chain to stores all over the world.

And having done it once, they discard the design and start working on the next one.

This store has pinpointed the modern soul. They have understood that these are the days of instant gratification via the web. Instant communication through twitter, “How do you like my new dress?” on Facebook with photo taken minutes before with the mobile phone.

Today’s consumer is fed a continuous tide of entertainment, concepts and visuals through phones, freeview, cable and internet. Fashions change with the blink of an eye.

Businesses, too, have to learn a new speed and nimbleness in what they provide and how they respond. Maybe Zara is telling us that the prep-a-porter fashion showings six months ahead of the season just aren’t on any more. There’s a whole new product cycle coming through.

Certainly if you are looking for an example of who’s doing it right, you’d better go loiter in the Zara store for an hour.

ray@ebeatty.com