Wide Angle

Perhaps you’ve seen episodes of Name That Tune on the Game Show Network (or maybe you’re old enough to remember when it was a hit in the 1970s).  Regardless, contestants competed to identify a song by listening to as few notes as possible.  I was reminded of that show while watching commercials during the Olympics last week.  Within the first few seconds of seeing a new ad, I knew it was for McDonald’s.  There were no golden arches or kids eating French fries to help me; there was just a vibe, an emotional connection that immediately made me recognize the ad as McDonald’s.

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. Read More »

In this day of the attention economy, most B2B companies have bolted electronic publishing houses onto the front of their marketing engines.  For many, it’s constructed out of little more than a marketing agenda, a keyword index, and reluctant technical staffers-cum-copywriters.  Given its emerging status as the divine path to high-quality sales leads, the online content manufacturing business is burgeoning across nearly every industry. But to the potential buyer conducting research online, this development has been a blessing and a curse, as picking through such a swelling mass of relevant style-over-substance content leads to frustratingly few instances of “I’m glad I read that.”  More often it leads to feelings of boredom combined with a vague sense of being misled with hype, slanted content, unsubstantiated claims, and complex arguments.  Why? Read More »

In my last post, I wrote about the ever higher authenticity expectations that consumers have of their brand interactions.  To meet those expectations, marketers spend millions with agency partners and agonize over how to structure their agency rosters. 

Click Image to Enlarge

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.  Read More »

We may not have the jet-set, champagne-fuelled ceremonies of the B2C ad world, but our 2009 B2B MarComm Awards are just as exciting, if somewhat lower scale. 

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

Read More »

Inauthenticity.  Human senses are wired to sniff it out.  We pick up subtle cues in non-verbal gestures.  Entire fields of expertise have developed to study nonverbal communications.

We make note of eye contact, or lack thereof (known as oculesics).  We know when smiles are artificial from movement of facial muscles (known as kinesics).  We can sense undercurrents of real emotion in voices (paralanguage or vocalics).

All of these are subtle indicators that, taken together, enable us to judge reasonably accurately whether something (or somebody) is fishy or truly authentic.

Click Image to Enlarge | Consumer expectations of authenticity are increasing; marketers who don’t keep up risk consumer punishment.

When it comes to marketing communications, consumers seem willing to tolerate moderate authenticity—the middle in the distribution at left.  After all, we as consumers expect some level of artificiality from advertising, as with movies or TV shows.  But, consumers duly reward or punish communications in the tails of the authenticity curve. 

Focus on the Zone of Reward in the right tail of the authenticity curve.  You see this kind of authenticity in Burger King’s Whopper Freakout ads—you don’t need a subtitle to tell you those are real people’s reactions.  As a result, these ads are subtly more powerful for consumers, and they reward Burger King for that.  Read More »