Next TV Cancellation: 30-Second Commercials BY DOUG TSURUOKA INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Joseph Jaffe thinks the 30-second TV commercial is dead. Consumers skip over TV ads on their TiVos or they use search engines like Google to buy products, says Jaffe, a media consultant. He thinks marketers who cling to the 30-second spot will end up like dinosaurs. If Jaffe's right, it will mean big changes for the ad industry. According to industry statistics, advertisers spent over $70 billion on TV ads last year. Of that, about $45 billion went to broadcast networks. This money may shift to new types of media, such as online and wireless ads. Jaffe has written a book about these seismic shifts in marketing. "Life After the 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand With a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising" will hit bookstores May 20. Some marketers are already aware that the ranks of consumers watching traditional TV ads are plunging, Jaffe says. Others still don't get it, he says. A sign of a shift, Jaffe says, came in March when Pepsi said it was relaunching its low-calorie soft drink, Pepsi One, through a "television-free, celebrity-free commercial diet." Pepsi plans to plug its product entirely through the Internet and other new media. "People who think the 30-second spot is still alive might want to reconsider their statement in view of the announcement to relaunch Pepsi One without TV ads," Jaffe said. And as TiVos and other digital video recorders spread, even more consumers will skip TV commercials, Jaffe says. According to a study by Accenture, digital video recorders will be in 40% of U.S. homes by 2009. That's up from 8% now. Jaffe recently spoke to Investor's Business Daily about the shift. IBD: What's happening to the 30-second TV ad? Jaffe: There's too much clutter . . . and consumers aren't as dumb as they used to be. There also are unacceptable levels of wastage in terms of marketers paying for TV commercials that are never seen, don't work or are overexposed to consumers. So all this combines to make the 30-second spot nothing more than wallpaper . . . background noise. IBD: What does this mean for the ad industry? Jaffe: According to a new study by Accenture, ad skipping on devices like TiVo and on-demand viewing (of TV shows and movies) could cost the TV industry $27 billion in lost ad revenues over the next five years. So the shift is very real. IBD: Will people still watch TV commercials? Jaffe: I'm not saying that all TV commercials are dead. I'm saying that the classic 30-second TV spot as the benchmark of all ad and marketing efforts is dead and has outlived its usefulness. People with devices like TiVo are watching more TV programming than ever — they are just not watching ads, since these devices skip over them. IBD: So TV ads in some form will continue? Jaffe: Yes. There's still plenty of room for innovation and imagination. One (option) is what I call advertising on-demand where consumers receive TV ads if they request them. IBD: You mentioned Pepsi's decision not to use TV ads in its relaunch of Pepsi One. What examples are there of other ad media supplanting the 30-second spots? Jaffe: There are plenty of examples involving mobile phones, Internet games, DVD and other digital media. If you go to actor Christopher Walken's bio on the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) Web site, you'll see that he lists a video game called "Ripper" as part of his professional credits. This is a game that came out well over 10 years ago. The question is why do Hollywood movie stars realize the importance of these online games as marketing media whereas mainstream marketers haven't? IBD: What are other examples of new types of marketing? Jaffe: Bono from the rock group U2 recently told the entire audience at a concert in L.A. to take out their cell phones. There was a sea of light. It was like the Zippo lighter had been reinvented for the 21st century. Bono then asked everyone with a cell phone to send the text word "unit" to a specific number. This was all designed to support his personal efforts to help people in Africa, but it's also an example of the marketing and communicative power of mobile phones. IBD: What's the marketing moral of this story? Jaffe: Traditional marketers have continued to cling to using celebrities in their 30-second TV spots almost like security blankets. That's why all you see are stars like Sarah Jessica Parker in 30-second TV ads for The Gap. But the irony is that celebrities like Bono and Chris Walken have figured out how to energize their own brands by turning to new marketing like Internet games and mobile phones. U2's Bono has hit on the idea of community marketing, which I define as marketing to and through a community of consumers (like U2 fans). IBD: Will other big-name companies follow Pepsi's lead in turning away from TV ads? Jaffe: I would say yes. But the answer isn't to completely eradicate TV ads. The answer is to be smarter about the media mixes that are ultimately optimized or deployed by advertisers. TV is no longer the star of the show. It's a member of the supporting cast. It's just another tool in the tool kit. Blogger 'Just Does It,' Turns Tiger Woods Clip Into Instant Nike Commercial by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, Apr 14, 2005 8:00 AM EST THE SCENE WAS SET: TIGER Woods, mustering all his resources in the final round of the Masters on Sunday, hits a chip shot that lands some 20 feet from the 16th hole--and, after making a chance 90-degree turn in the hole's exact direction, comes to a complete standstill on its lip before dropping in. A magical moment for Tiger and the sport, for sure. But Chris Mike, director of marketing and advertising for Nike Golf, said he immediately saw the moment's potential for another cause: the marketing of Tiger's prototype Nike One Platinum golf ball, which had just made the miraculous journey. Mike said his team began work Monday on commercials for One Platinum, which most likely will include Tiger's shot, and could start running as early as next week. The twist? Joseph Jaffe, marketing blogger and president of the "new marketing" consultancy "jaffe, L.L.C.," beat Nike's marketing team to the punch on Sunday by uploading Tiger's moment on the 16th green from his TiVo to his personal computer, adding Nike's "Just Do It" slogan at the end of the shot, and posting the sequence in 30- and 60-second form to his blog that same night. Since Monday, Jaffe's site, jaffejuice.com, has received over 50,000 hits, in large part because established public relations blogger Steve Rubel chose to link to Jaffe's blog. "I'm very interested in people creating their own ads," said Rubel, who is also vice president of client services at CooperKatz. "Jaffe's ad wasn't innovative because of the creative design, which was pretty straightforward. What was innovative about the ad was the consumer initiative that it represents." Jaffe said he never set out to wow people with his design skills. "The thing took less than half an hour to put together," Jaffe said. "I didn't do this as a designer; it was an experiment to test the powers of viral marketing. It's all part of my belief that the only way to revive the relationship between consumers and marketers today is to throw the rules and the roles we play out the window. This just proves how easy it is for consumers to have a voice." Many experts who track the growth of viral marketing--also known as word-of-mouth marketing--portray the phenomenon as the inevitable outgrowth of accessible graphic design tools and consumers' desire to help define the brands around them. "Thanks to applications like iMovie, content is so easy to make now, and we see this all the time now from consumers," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek--which measures consumer sentiment and buzz online--and co-founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Blackshaw cited two pieces of consumer-generated media, each inspired by Apple's iPod, to illustrate the unpredictable nature of consumer control. In one well-known instance, a schoolteacher by the name of George Masters spent about five months creating a professional-quality iPod ad that has been widely distributed around the Web. In another case, two brothers and professional filmmakers named Casey and Van Neistat took a different tone after Apple allegedly wouldn't replace Casey's iPod battery when it died on him. They filmed each other spray-painting the words "IPOD'S UNREPLACEABLE BATTERY LASTS ONLY 18 MONTHS" on as many public iPod advertisements as they could find and then posted the video at iPodsdirtysecret.com. Other established brands--Ford, Puma, Volkswagen--have been the victim of viral efforts by consumers who haven't depicted the brand's image nearly as well as Jaffe portrayed Nike. "This was really a dream scenario from a marketing perspective for Nike," said Jonathan Carson, president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, a research firm created to mine conversations that consumers have with one another online. "Companies run the risk of backlash when they immediately swoop in on powerful, natural events, and try to exploit them for their own gain. In this case a consumer took the initiative, which takes the weight off their shoulders." Jaffe found it surprising that consumers went to his business-to-business site to post comments about his ad. "It's really an industry site where you wouldn't normally expect consumers to tread," Jaffe said. "They're playing in our sandbox, which is great, because it's just another example of consumer/marketer roles being disregarded and consumers using the voice they've been given." Nike's Mike said he had not seen Jaffe's ad, nor would he comment more broadly on consumer-generated media. Steve Rubel said he thought it would be a mistake for Nike to force the ad's removal. "No public action is really the best plan of action for Nike in this case," said Steve Rubel. "Unfortunately, they don't have a blog where they can post this, but they should at least send it to their ad agency." Added Rubel: "This type of feedback is truly invaluable." How Can General Motors Remake Itself? By STUART ELLIOTT - The New York Times There used to be a saying that what's good for General Motors is good for America. But that was in the days when one of every two cars sold in the United States bore a G.M. brand name. Now, with its market share falling toward 25 percent, General Motors is struggling to revive its core business - selling America its cars, trucks and minivans - and seems in need of a few good ideas. The problem is not the size of the General Motors advertising budget. Last year, the company spent almost $3 billion to advertise to American consumers, according to TNS Media Intelligence, second only to Procter & Gamble. The extent of G.M.'s difficulties was underscored by a survey, taken last week by the trade publication Advertising Age, which asked its readers, "Can G.M. be fixed?" A startling 46 percent of the respondents replied no. Even so, there remain many on Madison Avenue who believe that General Motors can turn around, although, as more than one executive said, it will not be easy. With the caveat that free advice can sometimes be worth what it costs, what follows are some of their suggestions, offered in interviews yesterday. The most important step General Motors can take is "to reverse-engineer its marketing strategy," said Joseph Jaffe, president of Jaffe, a new-marketing consulting company in Westport, Conn., "from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach." "General Motors has forgotten who drives its cars," he added. "It all starts with one consumer, and you build from there." To accomplish that, G.M. must accelerate a shift from its traditional "mass-market, one-size-fits-all approach," Mr. Jaffe said, as epitomized by broad-based television commercials and print advertisements, and more ardently embrace unconventional tactics. Among them, he listed producing video games that double as advertising; running ads in video games; inviting consumers to create their own ads, on Web sites; and making use of branded entertainment, embedding ads in television programs and movies. That change would be particularly effective, said Michael Megalli, a partner at Group 1066, a corporate identity consulting company in New York, in reaching an audience that General Motors ought to court more to help alleviate its problems: younger consumers. "The aging baby-boomer set is lost to G.M.," Mr. Megalli said. "G.M. should go young the way Toyota has with Scion." His reference was to a brand of offbeat cars created by Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. specifically for younger consumers, a risk that has so far paid off with growing sales. A major area where General Motors can change its game, the executives agreed, is in its brand offerings. "In a society looking more for a set of values on wheels to bond with, G.M. seems to be falling back on offering commodity brands" sold on deals and rebates, said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a consulting company in New York specializing in brand and customer loyalty. "Other brands give you a sense of what they are: Mercedes-Benz stands for living well; BMW stands for living fast; Volvo stands for safety," he added. "When we ask people about G.M. brands, we get very neutral assessments; they don't stand for anything." Jonah Disend, president of Redscout, a brand strategy consultant in New York, agreed. "G.M. has gone from the great branding company to the great 'blanding' company," he said, in large part because "it can't possibly focus on all the brands it has." There are eight principal G.M. brands in the United States: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, Pontiac, Saab and Saturn. A ninth, Oldsmobile, has been discontinued. That panoply of brands ought to be pared quickly, many executives advised. "If we're honest, Buick and Pontiac have not meant anything to anyone for a very, very long time," said Marc E. Babej, president of Reason Inc. in New York, a marketing strategy company. "They might look good on a corporate positioning grid, but not in the marketplace." As the company discontinues brands deemed laggards, Mr. Babej suggested, it should also refocus its remaining brands on one mission: "building cars that give people more of a reason to choose them." "No amount of brand image, no matter how well-spun, can stand in for product differentiation," Mr. Babej said. Praising the efforts G.M. is making to revive its Cadillac brand with a fleet of distinctive new products, backed by emotional advertising that resonates with the intended audience, Mr. Babej said that example could be emulated by making Chevrolet "the all-American, entry-level brand" and Buick "the brand for the middle class." Bob Wyatt, partner and executive creative director at Union, an advertising agency in New York, said that General Motors should heed its own "heritage of branding" and recreate the model that worked so well in its early decades, of making each divisional brand stand for a different step on a hierarchy of desire. "They should have consumers move up the ladder in the different stages of their lives as they used to, from Chevrolet all the way to Cadillac," Mr. Wyatt said. That could be accomplished by "simplifying the lineups of each division so each brand stands for something specific," he added, rather than the overly broad current approach of having, for instance, Chevrolets that run from cheap (Aveo) to expensive (Corvette). Clive Chajet, chairman of the Chajet Consultancy in New York, a corporate and brand identity company, offered another idea for refocusing the G.M. divisions after "choosing those few that have the best future and abandoning the others." "Each division could specialize in a type of vehicle, not a type of buyer," Mr. Chajet said, suggesting that Chevrolet could concentrate on sport utilities and Pontiac on sports cars. (The GMC division already eschews cars in favor of trucks and sport utilities.) Mr. Chajet said General Motors could also "take a leadership role in energy-efficient vehicles, which would do wonders for its corporate image." And to minimize potential consumer skepticism, he added, "it could be done in a way that says: 'We're not condemning the way cars are built now. But we're going to lead in finding the new ways to build them.' " One core element of the G.M. corporate image has long been its American roots, most recently expressed in an ad campaign after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that carried the theme "Keep America rolling." The executives were divided on whether that was a problem or a solution. Mr. Megalli of Group 1066 said he believed American consumers were "more open to the idea of buying foreign cars," as evidenced by the sales growth enjoyed by Japanese brands like Toyota and South Korean brands like Hyundai. As a result, he added, General Motors should present itself to potential customers as "a world car company" in the way a competitor, Ford Motor, does, by "bringing over here its foreign brands like Opel and Vauxhall." But John Diefenbach, a partner at TrueBrand, a corporate and brand identity consulting company in San Francisco, took the opposite tack. "To make an emotional connection with consumers," Mr. Diefenbach said, "G.M. can revisit its American heritage, so long as it's not in a schmaltzy, flag-waving way." "Plenty of companies in America such as Anheuser-Busch have gotten 'the America thing' right," he added, "and G.M. has more of a right to do it than almost anybody." Digital Marketing Conference & Expo Metropolitan Pavilion, April 19-20 "Integrating Online into the Integrated Mix – a Strategic Overview" April 19, 2005 from 10 to 10:50 a.m. Media neutrality. Total communications planning. 360-degree integration. A lot of buzzwords which look great on paper, but in reality are a lot more difficult to effectively and efficiently implement. And compounding the challenge of integration is figuring out where and how online fits into it all. All variations on the same idea hinge around a vital question: exactly what is Online's role in the broad communications mix? Media Mix Modeling or cross media research is one slice of a much more complex equation which simply must be addressed from a consumer-centric vantage point in order to accurately evolve. Then there's a creative imperative which could and should conceivably dictate to what extent marketing and media dollars are divvied up and allocated. And in a bizarre twist to it all, Interactive's role could very well prove to be the key to the entire integration conundrum – the ultimate integrator, without which nothing but empty promises and untapped potential remains. New Marketing guru and author Joseph Jaffe will reveal all in what proves to be a provocative and thought provoking address, which will include a sneak peak into his Adweek book, "Life after the 30-second spot: Energize your brand with bold alternatives to traditional advertising." http://www.digitalmarketingexpo.com/digitalmarketing/index.jsp iMedia Summit, May 22-25, 2005 – Amelia Island 10:00-11:00am Creative Panel: "New Challenges for Creative Directors" Moderator: Joseph Jaffe, Editor-at-Large, iMedia Communications Rei Inamoto, Global Creative Director, AKQA Mike Yapp, National Executive Creative Director, Carat Interactive Jill Griffin, SVP/Group Account Director, Media Contacts http://www.imediaconnection.com/summitspring/4912.asp Contact Advocate, Inc. 2005 ConnectME! Conference April 29, 2005 8:00am - 4:30pm Westin Hotel Stamford, Connecticut Connecting with the Empowered and Elusive Consumer – a New Marketing Blueprint for success http://www.contactadvocate.com/connectme/index.html