Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

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At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

One of the sharpest subversive ads of the year (a humble opinion) is available at http://www.tubgin.com/, and click on “A short, short story”.

These brands offer just a few examples of a broader trend in tapping directly into the edgier, snarkier sentiments of today’s consumer (Whitney had to tell me what snarky means).

Iconoculture—MLC’s new partner for bringing real-time consumer insights to our members—has picked up on this trend in its most recent research on “Subversive Branding.”  Iconoculture’s findings point marketers in an interesting direction: while subversive branding can breathe new life into our marketing messages, it also runs the risk of alienating consumers.

Iconoculture offers a few simple factors to consider before integrating subversion into your brand strategy:

• Category Norms: Is subversion common in your category? Is it rare? If you’re the only subversive brand in the category, that may offer an incredible opportunity to reach a niche, but it also may be a warning sign—anyone raising their hand to be the first “angry” life insurance provider?
• Target Audience: Will subversive marketing be novel or familiar to your target audience?  Will it connect with their values and attitudes? Will it pull in more consumers than it turns off?
• Consumer Involvement: Are consumers already doing subversive things with your brand? Can you embrace or build on what’s happening?  If so, it may be a sign that consumers are ready to see your brand’s dark side.

For more on subversive branding strategies, and the consumer values that are opening the door for marketers to show their dark side, MLC Members can tune into our upcoming webinar on subversive branding hosted by Iconoculture’s consumer strategist team.

There’s no shortage of sensational reporting on the sponsors.  For example, there’s an interesting report here on the buzz between Nike and Adidas (the official sponsor). Observation: the PR success for Adidas from the Jabulani ball has, like the flight of the ball, been erratic and unpredictable, but probably a net positive for Adidas. 

Meanwhile, other sponsors fled like rats off a sinking ship to get away from the implosion of the French national team.  Sacre (les) Bleus!

Non-sponsor brands also saw their share of action. In a provocative tale of ambush marketing, 36 female Dutch fans were detained for wearing orange miniskirts, evidently a clear symbol of Bavaria beer (NOT an official sponsor, by the way).

But beyond all the buzz and antics, what characterizes great, enduring world cup sponsorship marketing?

It’s safe to say that strong integrated marketing is at the core.  Plus, you’d expect vivid experiential and compelling social components. Moreover, in a global event such as the world cup, you’d want to see worldwide activation of the sponsorship.  Delivering all of this is a tall order.  In most cases, sponsors will have enlisted the creative brains, arms and legs of an entire roster of agencies to pull it off.

Looking behind the curtain, most client-agency models fall short.  Aligning a multitude of agency partners to play ball and truly collaborate–acting as if part of one team–is very difficult given competing incentives, inertia and agency allegiance.

That’s why we were fascinated to understand how Coca-Cola set up what it called “Red Lounge” to carry off its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics several years ago. Coke established this different-in-kind agency structure to go well beyond the coordination that clients usually settle for when working with multiple agency partners.  Coke was shooting for deeper collaboration, hoping that it could get it’s agency partners to build on each others’ ideas, and get to that magical 1 + 1 = 3 land.

In effect, what Red Lounge did is establish a common identity among different participating agency personnel–an identity that trumped the allegiance and incentives of  any individual on the team toward his or her home agency. Coke used a clever mix of structure, individual and joint incentives, team leadership, and psychological techniques to engender this “one team” kind of environment.  This led the agency personnel to check their competitive baggage at the door, and partner to create and activate world-class marketing.  As a result, by most accounts, the Olympic marketing effort was a huge success for Coke.

We’re eagerly watching to see how Coke performs when all is said and done at the 2010 World Cup.  Good luck to the sponsor brands in the final days of the Cup.

By the way, my pick for tournament winner?  The country where the rain stays mainly on the plain.  If I get that wrong, you can bet I’ll blame Paul, the prognosticating German octopus.  No kidding.

MLC Members, check out the Coca-Cola Red Lounge case study, which is part of a larger research study on creating high return agency partnerships (the Coke case study starts on p. 24).  The study also includes casework from companies like Clorox and Mars.

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario.

Following best practice, TELUS mapped their marcomm touchpoints to the target’s “typical day.”  Touchpoints included elevator wraps in prospects’ buildings, billboards in very specific locations in Toronto’s business district and key travel locations (e.g., Toronto Island Airports) and SMS messages to reach customers on the commute.

However, where TELUS really stood out here was HOW they identified the best touchpoints for their mix.  TELUS capitalized on the knowledge of their local sales-forces, who were able to point out the specific elevator shafts in the specific buildings where an ad would have the greatest potential to be seen by a set of prospects or customers in the target market.  So what is great here is how efficient the media spend was as a result of being able to capitalize on internal intelligence.

As a bonus, by taking this approach when selecting their mix, TELUS ensured that the campaign was fully integrated with one of its other key communication channels – namely the sales force – who capitalized on the campaign extensively as they felt both enfranchised and knowledgeable about the communications effort.

Do you have your own example of B2B MarComm success from the past year and a half?  Submit your entry into our 2010 B2B MarComm Campaign Awards by June 30^th, and receive an extra ticket to our October Summit in Las Vegas.

There’s also this large sporting event coming up (in case you haven’t heard): the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Or rather, “the-every-fourth-year-global-football-tournament-to-determine-a-single-country-champion,” as FIFA would like me to refer to it in this space.

FIFA is playing brand police here in South Africa, and a ruthless outfit at that. You can find just a taste of their efforts in this article. My personal favorite – their request of Kalula, one of South Africa’s low-cost airlines, to withdraw its slogan “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know-What.” While fully understanding that FIFA and its corporate partners paid truckloads of money for brand exclusivity at the tournament, the brand management tenacity at play here seems to far exceed rational boundaries.

When you’re shutting down a street vendor for selling a scarf with the words World Cup on it, it seems a bit beyond the pale – especially here in South Africa, where the World Cup may be the lifeline to a better livelihood for that precise street vendor.

FIFA is even removing any brand mark from legitimate products sold in stadiums that are not linked to its corporate sponsors. FIFA’s marketing director Thierry Weil said this: “The restriction is, it must be unbranded, but you will still make money, so this unbranded one is not harming anyone.” By his stated logic, this is facially absurd. FIFA clearly believes that brand is paramount to financial success (as do we here at MLC), hence the restrictions on those brands not associated with it. The brand removal must be at least somewhat harmful if protecting even the omnipresent name World Cup proves so important.

Perhaps I’m going overboard and am blinded by the incredible hospitality the South Africans have shown on my trip thus far. I’d love to hear what our members think on this topic. Certainly, my colleagues in our Communications Executive Council have produced much research on the importance of reputation management; I would never argue with the merits of brand standards and guidelines produced by marketing.

Yet something about this example strikes me as going one step too far, taking brand management far beyond its intended purpose. It isn’t as if the public doesn’t know the World Cup brands. Official credit card: Visa (thank you Morgan Freeman). Official soft drink: Coca Cola. Official restaurant: McDonald’s. And now we have an official brand police officer – FIFA. To invert McDonald’s line, I’m not lovin’ it. But wait, am I allowed to write that?

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much?

Well, I’ve tasted it.  Several times.  The verdict?  It’s a welcome improvement, but not a nearly-double-your-market-cap-in-three-months kind of improvement.  Essentially, it tastes like they took the old crust and rubbed some garlic butter on it.

So here’s the question: How did a firm spend millions of marketing dollars improving a product, settle on some pretty incremental changes, and translate that into an 84% leap in stock price?

Simple: it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell.

Now, my point is not that Dominos’ marketing dollars didn’t result in an improved product—they almost certainly did.  But an improved product wasn’t the whole point.  The real reason the company spent millions of marketing dollars was… to say that it had spent millions of marketing dollars.  Why?  Because the message those marketing dollars convey is not only that Domino’s had perfected (or at least improved) its pizza, but also “we listened to you.”

It’s a perfect example of not selling on product features and benefits alone.  Weiner explains:

“I spent a lot of time thinking about how to change the perception of people who didn’t buy Domino’s. We talked to them, and read their blogs, and this is what they were saying. And I knew that, other than my mom, no one would care about “new and improved.” So if we just said, “Hey, this is a new and improved pizza,” we would not have gotten the doubters to try it.”

In other words, Domino’s isn’t saying, “buy our pizza because it has a garlic crust that intoxicates taste buds and stimulates serotonin production.”  Rather, they’re creating an experience around doing business with the company: “you told us our pizza tasted like cardboard, we took time to listen and made changes, so give us a try again!”

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch. 

National Instruments had a large base of enthusiastic customers, but realized these customers needed both the means and motivation to connect with each other.  Analysis of customers’ networking patterns revealed two core motivations: 1) building credibility with peers and 2) finding technical resources.  These key insights shaped the entire campaign’s choice of channel and message, both on and offline. 

Conferences for leading engineers offered opportunities for networking, training seminars kept customers up-to-date with cutting-edge technologies, and social media platforms enabled customers to collaborate and promote their professional successes.  National Instruments also generated extra chatter by bridging social media networks with real-world communities.  At the start of the campaign, keynote speakers at conferences educated attendees on ways to stay connected online; later, key online contributors received recognition at offline “Breakfast of Champions” events.

By designing networking tools to help customers achieve their own professional goals, National Instruments successfully boosted word of mouth, which increased awareness and sales.

MLC Members, check out our recent webinar discussion with  Deirdre Walsh, National Instruments’ Social Media lead, to learn more about National Instruments’ social media strategy and successes.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression.

It also left me wondering, “How many brands could do that?”  Instead of testing recall or being sure your logo/spokesperson/icon appears within the first magic number of seconds, could your advertising hold up to the “I can name that commercial in 3 seconds” test?  As I visit with members, the common response I get is “no”, immediately followed by “what are the best ways to get our marketing efforts to resonate at such a deep and emotional level?”

We blogged earlier on Shared Values, and the “secret sauce” to compelling marcomm is rooted in that research.  It starts with understanding that loyalty comes from an emotional bond you create with your consumer.  Sure, you need to have a great segmentation strategy and a smart value proposition.  But you also have to hit your consumer with messages that tie into deeper held beliefs and universal needs.

Our most recent work profiled an example from Clorox’s Kingsford Charcoal, a story that really resonates with Council members.  The brand team for Kingsford did an outstanding job of organizing the brand’s communications around the idea of “bringing the tailgate home”, which enables emotional connection to friends and family around the brand.  As a result, the Kingsford team dramatically boosted performance of a mature brand in a mature category.  MLC members, click the case link below for more details.

So, can consumers identify your marcomm in less than 3 seconds without the benefit of icons, spokespeople, or brand images?  If not consider the universal need that your brand fulfills – that “higher order” connection you can make with your consumer – and then filter your possible marcomm “hooks” against that universal need.

MLC Members, check out the Kingsford case study or watch this brief video on how to use these universal needs and cultural shortcuts.  And if you do pass the 3 second test, what is your secret sauce?

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In fact, we found that two-thirds of clients are establishing lead or full-service agency partnership models in hopes of achieving integrated communications.  But if you ask clients their likelihood of recommending their current agency partners on their ability to deliver the most target-resonant creative or touchpoint ideas, you get embarrassing NPS scores (see the graphic at left). 

What gives?

Here’s the problem: the cast of characters on the typical agency roster is too far removed from today’s target audiences to routinely and convincingly clear a higher authenticity bar. 

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By contrast, the ideal model would have clients reaching outside of the typical agency box to pull in partners who are much closer to—and who intimately know—the target audience (see the “amoeba” graphic at left).  For these creative partners, the oculesics, paralanguage, and vocalics of the target audience come naturally (see my last post if this is Greek to you).

To take an example, while heading up marketing with Toyota, Jim Farley and team used this amoeba model to engineer deep resonance and authenticity into the Tundra re-launch blitz.  Behind the curtains, Toyota augmented its standing agency roster by pulling in a dozen different creative partners who were deeply knowledgeable of the “true trucker” target audience.

To be sure, this model calls for greater collaboration between agencies and these smaller creative partners.  And that requires a firm hand from the client coupled with an ability to instill a sense of security in lead agencies—Farley and team were able to deliver here. 

The model isn’t right for all brands or all situations, by any stretch, but its more likely to regularly deliver authentic creative than most existing models.  If you’re asking yourself, “Can I really muster the courage to try this?”, you owe it to yourself to also ask, “What’s the price of falling below the authenticity bar?” 

MLC members: take a look at the webinar replay of the Toyota case study, in which Kim McCullough, head of marketing communications, shares her perspective on implementing the model.  The full case study includes details on how Toyota selected the right creative partners and how they managed agency roles and responsibilities differently to create an atmosphere of collaboration.

If you like that, you’ll love the broader study: Deepening Communications Resonance, available to MLC members here.

MLC Members can access the links in this post, including our showcase of all 50 entries to see the high quality of work and get ideas for your own campaigns. Despite the consistently high standard across campaigns, we had to select a few that stood out from the rest.

We are pleased to announce 8 finalists that excelled in terms of campaign focus, target understanding, message relevance, and channel impact:

2009 MLC B2B Marcomm Awards Finalists

• Alcatel-Lucent | Hotel Experience
• Motorola | Two-Way Radio Lead Generation Campaign
• National Instruments | Energizing Engineers at NI Week
• Qwest Communications | Voice of the Customer
• Telecom NZ | No One Will Know You Are Gone
• Telstra | Enterprise & Government Productivity
• TELUS | Who Knew
• Thomson Reuters | ProLaw Office

Overall, we were impressed by the level of innovation, customer insight, and online/offline integration on show. From inflatable dolls and an email that appears to be your own out-of-office notification to a video library of customer testimonials, these B2B campaigns are as fun and original as the best CPG campaigns.  And like consumer-focused campaigns, the best B2B campaigns also build on deep insights about customers’ personal motivations or aspirations, such as creatives’ dream of working from the beach or engineers’ desire for their peers’ respect. 

We were also struck by how fully these campaigns have integrated digital media into the touchpoint mix.  Motorola, for instance, uses webinars, live chats, and internet ads alongside traditional channels, while TELUS has pioneered the first Canadian B2B use of SMS marketing, and National Instruments has great success with social media at practically no cost.  The best campaigns also capitalize on cross-channel synergies: Alcatel’s virtual hotel tour livens up its Website, trade shows, and sales visits, while quotes/video clips from Qwest’s customer references feed a range of communications.

What’s more, these campaigns excel in commercial teaching and arming advocates within the client organization.  We see a shift in focus from product features to customers’ goals (enabling far greater relevance), even when many campaigns focus on similar generic goals – cost reduction, efficiency, productivity.  Also impressive, is the number of campaigns that engage customers by teaching them how to achieve their goals.  For example, Qwest’s customer interviews provide tips on how to overcome common business challenges (as well as why to use Qwest’s products), while Telstra’s productivity indicator enables customers to measure ICT-enabled cost savings.  Finally, several campaigns (including Thomson Reuters’ ProLaw Office) enable consensus-based purchase decisions by targeting a range of influencers within each client organization and arming advocates with multiple arguments for purchase.

To learn more from these campaigns, tune into our 2009 B2B MarComm Awards Finalists webinar on December 15^th at 11:00 AM EST.