Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results

2010 Super Reggie Winner: The Pedigree Crazy Pet Owners Campaign

Last week I attended PMA's Integrated Marketing Conference in Chicago and I'm still thinking about it. I wrote this post last week about some of the of great sessions and conversations going on for day one of Blur.  The conference ended with the Annual Reggie Awards gala and dinner which awarded the top promotional marketing campaigns of the past year that really made "the cash register ring". Here's the case history that was submitted of the winning campaign entered by Mars Petcare and their agency Catapult Action-Biased Marketing.

The PEDIGREE® Super Bowl: Crazy Pet Owners campaign was designed to bring renewed attention to PEDIGREE® and its Adoption Drive to find homes for the over 4 million dogs who enter shelters every year.

Leveraging a funny, irreverent Super Bowl advertisement featuring exotic and unmanageable “crazy” pets, PEDIGREE wanted to engage this vast audience in an online interactive experience that drove awareness of the brand, cemented its positioning as a caring organization, and helped participants contribute to the feeding of dogs without a home.

PEDIGREE surged to its highest dollar sales ever with $22.2MM booked in audited channels!  Dollar share reflected the same momentum with the highest dollar share gain in a single period.

Integration with PR efforts provided significant lift in pre-event site traffic and engagement with 115.5% lift in total page views and an incredible 225.2% lift in visitors with a 223.4% lift in unique visitors.

The positive momentum continued post-game with 146.2% lift in total page views, 238.7% lift in visitors; 242.3% lift in unique visitors and 19.4% lift in time spent per visit.

Total video views were 2,243,847 — which equated to the same number of bowls of food donated to dog shelters across the country.

PEDIGREE needed messaging to speak to the benefits of dog adoption without bringing down the lighthearted mood of the Super Bowl audience. It also needed a hub where consumers could take action, share in the adoption cause and engage with the brand after the commercial aired.

SITE CREATIVE
What better way to communicate a great message than with humor! A hilarious microsite was created that supported Super Bowl messaging and included tongue-in-cheek behind-the-scenes “Crazy Pet” stories, communicated via documentary-style videos of people who own a ”crazy pet” — like Rusty the Rhino, Bruno the Ostrich, and Max the Bison.

To both grab, and keep, consumer attention, Rusty the Rhino was featured on a startling 3D animated homepage takeover for the PEDIGREE Website that literally caused the screen to shatter as Rusty stampeded through. The tagline “Maybe You Should Get a Dog” resonated through the entire campaign.

OFFER
An engagement program was created for those who wanted to help, but could not adopt.  For every ad and “behind the scenes” video viewed, one bowl of food was donated to a shelter dog. Additional online content supported the Adoption Drive and PEDIGREE’s mantra of “Help Us Help Dogs.”

SOCIAL NETWORKING
The program was promoted via PR and distributed virally across the Web through Facebook videos, Twitter, an iPhone application, and paid search. Content was also available across post-game online channels, including Yahoo! and YouTube.

PEDIGREE surged to its highest dollar sales and highest volume gains ever as a result of the campaign. The site, iPhone app, “behind the scenes” content, disruptive takeover and additional online and offline elements provided a powerful combination of creativity and technology and drove awareness of the adoption drive, donation of food to shelters and sales for the product.

Congratulations to the team for a great campaign. Check out Pedigree's current pet adoption Facebook page that is raising food for pet shelters.

"PMABlur Conference Wraps Up: Mars Petcare's Pedigree Crazy Pet Owners Takes Home the Super Reggie

PMA's Annual Integrated Marketing Conference wrapped up yesterday and yes, everything is a bit of a "Blur" this morning. From all the information that I consumed over the past two days from a diverse group of speakers, to the Reggie awards gala last night where the wine didn't stop flowing, I'm not sure what to focus this post on. So I guess I'll just touch upon some of the highlights.

Beth Ann Kaminkow was this year's conference chairperson and she spoke after the last speaker of the event and asked those of us left in the audience what was the one-word we would use to describe the conference. Besides Blur some words shouted out where exciting, remarkable, social, and lynchpin (referring to Seth Godin's luncheon keynote talk and new book). Beth Ann's word was OPEN....openness, open-minded, open-source creativity, all defining the community feeling that we experienced with each over the course of the two days in sharing our best practices, wisdom and creativity.

Thanks to Beth Ann, President of Tracey Locke, for doing such a great job and bring together such as great range of speakers, including Seth Godin who inspired us all. Seth said that we all can by artists, we can be a genius. People tend to follow those that are interesting, so lead the.

#PMABlur Conference Day One Highlights: Mt. Dew's DEWmocracy & Jet Blue's Twitter programs engage customers

Day one of Blur, PMA’s 2010 Integrated Marketing Conference got underway today. I arrived in Chicago this morning a little behind schedule since my plane out of Rochester was delayed because the crew was late! They arrived with breakfast bags in hand and told us once we got settled on the plane that they had a late night.

I just became a new user of Foursquare and used the location-based tool to do my first official check-in at the Fairmont Hotel here in Chicago and got my first points. The only other “friend” that checked in at the Fairmont was David Berkowitz. He’s been using the tool much longer then I have and has been on a multi-city trip around the country the past couple of weeks. So when I caught up with him later I asked for a few tips on how this is supposed to work.

I missed the opening session which was a welcome from Bonnie Carlson, PMA’s president, and then the opening keynote from Univision Communications. I settled in to hear Marc Hanson from Pepsi’s Mt. Dew speaking about their integrated marketing campaign, DEWmocracy. They ran the first part of this campaign in the summer of 2008, tying into the presidential election year. They asked consumers to vote for their next Mt. Dew in which they gave them a choice of a red, white or blue flavor. Voltage, a red raspberry flavor, won with 43% of the votes and Mt. Dew rolled out the new product in 1st quarter ’09.

The ROI Mt. Dew saw was 36 million cases of product sold, 85% which was incremental. They achieved this through off-shelf placements in end caps, coolers and other locations at retail. They claim that the campaign was all about “bringing the voice of consumers and a unique product to store shelves”.

I’m skipping now to my favorite break-out session of the afternoon which was in the Digital track from the marketing team at Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston and Tara Ryan-Carson. They shared with us some of what they’ve learned over the past year as they’ve experimented with social media, mostly Twitter. They started off talking about how they dealt with a crisis situation when one of their jets sat on the tarmac at JFK for hours enraging customers and becoming a PR nightmare. They learned that they needed to listen to the customers' complaints and explain to them as best they could how they were going to fix it for the future.

PMA Blur Conference: Microsoft & House Party share how they debuted Windows 7 to an international group of partiers

I’m headed to Chicago to attend the PMA's Annual Integrated Marketing Conference which is called “Blur”  this year. It starts tomorrow, Tuesday and runs through Wednesday at the Fairmont Hotel.  This year the PMA they've formally named me as their "Official Conference Blogger" and included me on their website's speakers page. So in my attempt to do a great job covering the conference, here's one more pre-event post.

On Day 2, Wednesday, I'll be getting a chance to finally meet Kitty Kolding, CEO of House Party who is speaking that day. I wrote about House Party in this post last July and also here the year before. I contacted Kitty when I wrote the first post and since then I've been keeping in touch with the company and watching them grow. So I got a sneak peak of what Kitty, along with her client John Dougherty, Director of Marketing for the Windows Business Group of Microsoft will be speaking about.

Last fall Microsoft engaged House Party to help them debut and demonstrate their new Windows 7 operating system to a global audience. What House Party does is integrate actual social events that happen in the real world with social media in the online world. Their parties actually consists of thousands of parties that take place across the country and include an exclusive brand experience at the center of the action. These specially designed parties are sponsored by a leading brand and take place in the homes of carefully selected consumer hosts who can invite their friends, family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, whoever they wish, to experience these uniquely fun parties and the products they feature.

Microsoft was House Party's inaugural global event which occurred in 12 international locations on various dates within the month of October. An estimated 800,000 people participated in the Windows 7 launch parties in Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Hong Kong and Japan and the United States. All party goers experienced and learned about Windows 7’s new offerings in a fun, party atmosphere.

“Customer feedback is truly what shaped Microsoft’s development of Windows 7, which is why we wanted to give consumers the opportunity to experience the new operating system themselves in a comfortable atmosphere with friends and family,” said John Dougherty from Microsoft. “Working with House Party to facilitate these gatherings provided a great way for people all over the world to see and understand how Windows 7 fits into their lives on a daily basis.” 

To unify the 12 multinational event sites, the company launched a custom-branded program portal to accommodate the expansion’s significant global traffic and complex routing requirements. For each language, the company launched fully functional in-language sites, supported by a team of multilingual customer service experts to support users all over the world.

“As the leading in-home activation marketing company in the United States, House Party was equipped to expand globally and offer our unique marketing platform in countries around the globe,” said Kitty. “Universally, consumers are eager to build awareness for the brands and products they love, no matter what the culture or language.”

House Party now also has the capability to conduct events in China and Brazil. All global events are localized, with all offline and online party activity conducted in the local language.

So this is a great example of how using advocates, on a worldwide basis, can be very powerful. I'm interested to find out if Microsoft is keeping in contact with these party goes to gain additional insights and feedback and I will let you know what I learn, so stay tuned.

How are your brackets doing? Reese's Perfect Play Sweepstakes ties in with NCAA March Madness.

The countdown to the 2010 Final Four in Indianapolis is now underway. So how's your brackets doing so far? We're just a couple of days now into the NCAA March Madness and I've already heard a few people saying their out of the bracket race due to a few upsets that have occurred.

This year we've got our local favorite, the Syracuse Orangemen as the #1 seed in the Big East, so as soon as the wearin' of the green was over, orange took it's place. Tonight they play their first game in the tournament in Buffalo against the Vermont Catamounts

Now there are many different bracket contests that you could have participated in this year. However, one of the top brand promotions that has caught my attention this year is the Reese's Pick the Perfect Play Sweepstakes. It began on March 1st and runs through April 11 with six weekly periods to play for a chance to win the grand prize which is a NCAA 2011 Final Four trip for four people which will take them to Houston.

Each week players can view the four video clips on the Reese's Perfect Play website that highlight some of the previous week's college basketball moments and then vote for the one that they think is the "Reese's Perfect Play". At the end of each week a celebrity judge will select the video clip that they think is the "Reese's Perfect Play" and if it's the same one the player voted for, that player will receive an entry into the weekly sweepstakes drawing as well as for the grand prize. Weekly prizes consist of EA Sports NCAA Basketball 10 video games and coupons good for a bag of Reese's Dark Peanut Butter Cups Miniatures.

 This week's celebrity judge is CBS Sports basketball analyst Greg Anthony who will make this week's Judge's Perfect Pick. So for those whose bracket picks are already dead, they can check out this sweepstakes and possibly have some better luck. Also, people can visit the Reese's Facebook Fan Page that currently has over 1.6 million fans and is utilizing the social network to also promote the sweepstakes along with their "Bracketology" commercial.

Go Syracuse!

Meet me in Chicago at PMA's Blur, the marketing conference that erases the lines

Yvonne DiVita, who is the founder of the Lip-sticking Blog, along with her partner, Tom Collins, were big influences on my decision to enter the blogosphere when I launched this blog three years ago. I reflected upon that today in my blog post as guest blogger over at the Lip-sticking Blog. 

See I’ll be headed back again to Chicago next week to attend the PMA's upcoming Annual Integrated Marketing Conference which this year is called “Blur”. It's taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 22-23, at the Fairmont Hotel. Now I've been a guest of PMA's conference for the past three years and have written many blog posts about their conferences before, during and after. This year, however, they've formally named me as their "Official Conference Blogger" and included me on their website's speakers page. So the pressure to do a good job covering the event is a little stronger now this year.

When I first started my blog PMA didn't have a blog nor did they have the staff to write one. So they invited me as a guest to their conference in return for blogging about it. I then learned as much as I could about blogging from Yvonne and Tom, along with Greg Bell who they introduced me to who had also recently started a blog to "cover jazz around Rochester and Beyond" called Jazz@Rochester.

Swell.com utilizes Win it Wednesdays to keep their Facebook fans engaged

So you've launched a Facebook fan page, now what? With Facebook being the fastest growing site on the Internet with 350 million worldwide members and 133 million in the U.S., it is a force that marketers cannot ignore any longer. Many however have rushed to launch a page without first having developed a clear strategy of what to do with it.

I've been hearing similar comments from many people saying that they've launched a Facebook page, invited their network of friends, family and colleagues, and they're now stuck at that number of fans. So how do you engage your fan base with the hope of also seeing it grow?

One strategy that has proven itself to be highly effective with maintaining a blog can also work for a Facebook page which is developing a routine calendar. For a blog you may decide to write about headline news on Mondays, Tuesdays its sharing content from another blog, Wednesdays is a book or product review, Thursdays it's about your business, and Fridays are for fun, personal stories. Now take that same concept and apply it to developing some scheduled marketing activities you can post on your Facebook page. This can not only help you keep on top of your social marketing activities but it can also help to increase your audience’s trust and engagement because they become used to the routine.

The difference with a social network vs. a blog though is that you now have a vast resource of applications that you can use to do fun, interactive activities. I've been using Wildfire's Social Media Marketing Platform for some of my clients to run sweepstakes and contests on Facebook, Twitter and off a website which I market as Social Sweeps promotions. Wildfire recently wrote about another marketer using their platform that is a great example of one that had developed a routine promotional activity on their Facebook Fan page.

Swell.com is an online-only retailer of clothing, gear, and other products for the surf industry. Every Wednesday they hold a sweepstakes on their Facebook Page called “Win it Wednesday!” where they give away some of their own products as prizes that are relatively inexpensive. So one week it's a cute dress by Billabong or a trendy pair of board shorts. Swell’s Facebook fan base, which is now over 4,600 people as of this blog post, has become used to this weekly routine, which Swell has been running for several months. Based on the steady fan growth that Swell has experienced as well as the comments that fans are posting on Swell’s wall, “Win it Wednesdays” is proving to be a hit with fans and a highly effective strategy for Swell.

So by integrating a promotion with the viral features of social media, you can get your fans to help you spread the word and create positive brand awareness for you. With a few easy clicks, fans can inform their friends about a promotion and these friends can in turn inform their friends. You can be creative as Swell has been and pick one day a week to run a sweepstakes promotion. You could then chose another day to run a coupon and another to upload a video or some photos. So if you plan your strategy and your calendar, you should both see your fan base increase along with their engagement. 

Disney's Alice in Wonderland scores well on Facebook

Last Friday we finally had the long-awaited theatrical release of Disney's Alice in Wonderland. Casting Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, together again with Tim Burton, was enough to get all of us fans charged up. Unfortunately I haven't yet had the chance to see the movie and I understand the reviews have not been so positive. When your expectations are so high, it's sometimes hard to live up to them. Nevertheless I still plan to see the film soon in the theater.

I did become a fan of the Alice in Wonderland Facebook fan page, which as of today has over 1.1 million fans. I think they've done a pretty good job of engaging the fans. They've included some fun applications and have been updating the wall consistently with video clips of the movie and interviews of the cast members as well as short polls. 

The one, fun app they've developed invites fans to join the Mad Hatter and his army to battle the red queen. Fans can replace the Mad Hatter's face in an image with a face from one of their Facebook photos which can then be shared with friends. So I've included mine here.

Fans can watch the movie trailer and also purchase tickets to see the movie at a theater in their area from right off the page. The polls ask you simple questions like "who's your favorite character?" and  "who would you most like to be?" And of course fans can also see what all the other fans are saying about the movie, most of what I see on the page is very positive.

So effective social media marketing with Facebook fan pages doesn't have to be a very complicated issue. Sometimes the simpler the better. The trick is to engage your fans so they keep coming back. Therefore, the more you post, the more they can interact with you. And each time they interact with you it then provides you with the opportunity to gain more fans by having them share your brand and your message with their friends. So we all don't have to go MAD trying to be too WONDERFUL!

If you've seen the movie, please let us know what you think of it. Thanks.

Paper Monster-Less Tax Day Giveaway promotion from Neat Company ties in Twitter & their blog

Earlier today I wrote about this promotion and posted it on The Lip-sticking Blog since I am the guest blogger for Wednesdays. So I'm posting it here as well.

Wednesdays are my guest It's tax season again, the time of year that we all love to hate, especially us small business owners! I handed over all my papers to my accountant a couple of weeks ago which of course is the hardest part of the job. I have two daughters that are both in college now so I was excited to learn that I'd be getting some tax credits for this. My oldest daughter is in her second year, in what I believe to be the #3 most expensive college in the U.S. - NYU!

Anyhow I recently received an email advertisement from the Neat Company in which they invited me to "Tame the Paper Monster this Tax Season" and enter the "Paper Monster-Less Tax Day Giveaway". So it got my attention and I clicked through to learn more. 

They're promoting their NeatDesk scanner and digital filing system that digitizes and organizes documents, such as all those little receipts that you need for tax time. Their website has a brief, instructional video that demos the product and clearly states it's features and benefits. I'm liking that more and more companies are using videos online to communicate their products or services. Very smart online marketing.

Also what I like is that this promotion is very simple. They're giving away 10 of these little NeatDesk products with the intent to "spread a little organized, digital love this tax season". So I clicked on the "Enter Now" button and was taken to this blog page which told me about the two ways I could enter the sweepstakes:

1. I could comment right on the blog post telling them how NeatDesk will help me reduce paper clutter and simplify my life at tax time. They reminded me to use a valid email address so they can contact me if I win!

2. Or I could follow The Neat Company on Twitter and re-tweet the contest by posting a pre-written tweet that includes a short url and the hashtag #papermonster. 

So I did both, entered through the blog promotion and through their Twitter promotion. The Neat Company currently has 1,245 followers, now including me. I did a search for #papermonster and found a whole page and more of others who "want to Tame the Paper Monster" as well.

Yesterday I attended a breakfast event in Rochester with guest speaker Peter Shankman on social media which I wrote about on my blog here. Peter's advice was to keep it simple (so it can be retweeted) make it fun and make it relevant. This sweepstakes promotion does it all. Now I hope I win one of these little wonders. Will make my life in 2010 much simpler.

Peter Shankman on Social Media - Be better, have fun, and make it relevant!

Yesterday Peter Shankman was back in Rochester again, this time speaking to a full room of mostly women at a breakfast event hosted jointly by RWN (Rochester Women's Network) and GRC-NAWBO (National Association of Women Business Owners). It was held at the Woodcliff Hotel, which was a perfect setting located east of the city on one of our higher points overlooking the area on a much needed beautiful, sunny morning.

Now I had the privilege to hear Peter speak when he came to visit last October at a luncheon put on by our local PRSA chapter. Yesterday's talk was titled ""Social Media - Be better or take up residence on the Isle of Mediocrity', which was very similar to what he reviewed with us in October. However, I was still highly engaged and entertained by his lively, hour-long discussion. He again didn’t use any slides or video. He even got rid of the mike, which was too loud and poor quality.

He started out by telling us that he arrived the night before and tweeted that he was flying into the Rochester airport and if anyone would pick him up and give him a ride he would buy them dinner. Well one of my friends, Kelly, known as @craftyb on Twitter, responded and greeted Peter with a small balloon sculpture of a skydiver. For those that don't know, Peter's Twitter handle is @skydiver. He thought it was so cool and had the balloon skydiver with him that morning.

Peter is the founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc a boutique Marketing and PR Strategy firm located in New York City, with clients worldwide. He is perhaps best known for founding Help A Reporter Out, (HARO) which in just a year has become the de-facto standard for thousands of journalists looking for sources on deadline.

It's difficult to summarize all that Peter shared with us, but as before he focused on these 4 basic rules that were the key points that I believe he wanted us to walk away with.

Transparency – This is the "new black". Today we all need to be more open. In the long run it will save us. We are more apt to buy from companies today that we can connect with, such as those that have a CEO who blogs.

Relevancy – Make it relevant to your audience. Ask them what information they want and how they want to receive it.

Brevity – Keep your messages short. The average person’s attention span is now 2.7 seconds. That’s about as long as it takes to read a text message or tweet. Back in the 80’s it was 3 minutes, the time it took to watch a music video! Learn how to write.

Persistance – Make use of today’s social media tools and put yourself out there. Get on Facebook and connect with your network. Check to see who has a birthday today and send them a greeting. I remembered Peter's advice this morning and checked my Facebook birthdays and actually found 4 of my friends that have birthdays today. What's the chance of that? I wrote all of them a Happy Birthday greeting on their wall.

Peter closed with telling us that social media is really all about having someone else do your PR for you, whether it’s good or bad. So if you want positive buzz, you need to gain your customers’ trust, focus on customer service and give off good karma.

Thanks Peter for visiting Rochester again. Yes, he was promoting those pokens again as well. I got my Kitty from him the first time we met. One of his next stops he mentioned with be SXSW in Austin. Thanks also to my friend Kelly Mullaney for sharing the photos she took at the event that I've included here. You can see all the photos Kelly took here on Flickr! I forgot my camera again! Finally thanks to all the women who helped put on a great event.