5 Blogs Before Lunch

Auto Shows Feeling The Pinch: They're "probably not the best use of our marketing dollar right now."

The Auto Show industry is about to be hit, and hit hard. Reports are that many car companies are pulling back from spending their marketing dollars at car shows that seem a little bit like "fat" during these days of belt tightening.

Auto Shows are about 1). Press attention towards new vehicle announcements 2). Ego (a chance for the car companies to show off( and 3). A chance for consumers to "shop" for new cars without pressure from sales people.

Does the auto industry really need auto shows to fulfill any of these objectives? As a spokesman for Nissan told Advertising Age: auto show exhibitions are "probably not the best use of our marketing dollar right now."

GM was the first to announce that it will be scaling back its presence. Now, Nissan has announced it won't be exhibiting at Detroit's North American International Auto Show in January, and is also pulling out of February's auto show in Chicago.

This may mean the end of the flashy, spectacular, glitzy and tacky auto show industry as we know it. Auto Shows will need to re-invent themselves, and that sounds like a good thing.

Social Network Ads Not So Clickable

The popularity of social network sites is indisputable. Reports are that nearly 1/2 of the U.S. population visits sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and the like. But even though more than three in four social network users visit these sites at least once a week, just 57% of social net users say they have clicked on an ad over the past 12 months, vs. 79% of all Web users, according to new research from IDC.

From Mediaweek:
"The thinking has been that the popularity of [social networking sites] will attract a big audience and generate a lot of traffic, which in turn will produce enormous amounts of user-generated content and therefore advertising inventory, without any expenses for editorial staff or content distribution deals," said Karsten Weide, program director, digital Marketplace: media and advertising, IDC. That’s all proven true, said Weide, except the advertising part. “[These sites] have had a hard time selling this inventory."

88% of U.S. Teens Have Access To The Internet

According to a report by the Center for the Digital Future, 88% if teens aged 12-14 have access the Internet, while 100% (really?) of the same age group in Britain are able to be online.

Researchers in 13 countries talked to more than 25,000 people in Asia, Australia, North and South America and Europe in late 2007 and early 2008. According to the report, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent, the Czech Republic and Macao and 96 percent and Canada at 95 percent.

Source: Reuters

Mixing Google With P&G: Ol' Skool Meets Old School

Procter & Gamble spends nearly $9 billion on advertising.

They must know a thing or two about it.

And, the folks at Google know a thing or two about online media.

So, it seems logical that the two companies have lots of points of intersection, and a lot to talk about.

P&G recently revealed that it sent Tide brand managers to work with Google. Meanwhile, Google workers visited P&G's Cincinnati headquarters to help with training.

P&G said it wanted to extend its online reach. The next group to mix it up with the Google crew: managers of the Pampers brand.

More at International Herald Tribune and

Tactical Transparency

Companies have to breed trust among consumers by discussing their products on popular social media sites, says John C. Havens, co-author of a book called "Tactical Transparency."  It's a behavior as well as a philosophy.

He argues that the market and customers will increasingly demand that companies become more transparent--and punish those who fail to do so.

So what is the definition of "tactical transparency" (which may turn out to be this year's "Long Tail" buzz word). The term is used to describe the use of social media tools to let brands talk authentically about their products and services to their community.

In a Fast Company interview, Havens says: "It's a fact: your brand is being discussed off of your main portal. If you do not have a voice in those places where your audience already is, people will wonder why you are silent and they also will wonder what you may be hiding."

From where does Havens speak? He previously worked as a film and TV actor and appeared in The Thomas Crown Affair, Law & Order, and Spin City and now finds himself in the role of vice president of business development for BlogTalkRadio.com.

With Help From The Mob: Crowdsourcing

"Crowdsourcing"—community-driven online creation

Jeff Howe, the originator of the term "crowdsourcing," explains the phenomenon and suggests what motivates people to work for little more than bragging rights. The key to making it work, he says, is transparency and the democratization of information. "A lot of what goes into making crowdsourcing successful runs against the grain of what we find in corporate culture," he says.

Do CEO's Take Social Media Seriously? Personally, yes. Professionally, not so much

A recent survey of 200 chief executives by public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and PRWeek suggests that CEO's are not yet convinced that social media can be used as an effective marketing tool.

The survey suggests that while many CEOs use social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter personally, they're skeptical of its effectiveness when communicating with customers, and other stakeholders in the company.

Here are some of the findings, reported recently in Businessweek:

• 43% of the CEOs say they personally use social media sites oftern
• 19% visit these sites daily, but not for business
• 18% say they use them to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.

Why not?

• 48% say they lack relevance to the target stakeholder groups
• 37% voice concern about loosing control of their message
• 28% worry about return on the investment
• 23% blame a lack of knowledge and capability within the company

Effective?

• 62% see social media as having an impact on a company’s reputation
• 71% of CEOs said their company web site is the best way to communicate with consumers during a crisis.
• 48% say it can change sales.

All this hesitance around social media may just take time to change executive perception. Think how long digital media took to shift perception of its effectiveness?

The survey suggests that executives ae already convinced of the effectiveness of Word of Mouth and viral campaigns, with 60% saying those have more influence today than they did three years ago.

And, what is social media marketing, if not WOM and viral?

From Brandweek: Burson-Marsteller thinks CEOs should be more social. In the press release on the findings, Mark J. Penn President & CEO says “CEOs should understand that many of their stakeholders are active users of social media and that it can be an extremely effective means for communicating a message. I would argue that companies that are not engaging in social media are taking a bigger risk than the companies that are.”

He’s on Facebook.

Order a Pizza Without Leaving Your Facebook App

Guess what, Social Media and Fast Food Restaurants have something in common: their target audiences.

Pizza Hut, for example, just passed $1 billion in online sales, and they say that their Facebook application is generating a lot of business for them.

So it is not surprising that number of fast-food chains are targeting young consumers by driving them to order via Facebook or their iPhones.

What do the fast food restaurants get out of this? Well, sales of course, but also the chance to build databases of their customers in the process.

From Advertising Age:
A number of the nation's biggest fast-food chains are beginning to embrace text and iPhone ordering capabilities, at least as tests. Already for the three months ending in August, food marketers sent almost 1.4 million text-message ads, up 37% from the same period last year, according to ComScore's M:Metrics data. Consumers seem to want the offers: of all the ad categories using SMS marketing, restaurants had the highest response rates, with 15.5% of consumers responding to the ads.

Holiday Christmas Parties: Should You Be Mr. Scrooge Or Mrs. Thrifty This Year?

Financial services firms are canceling Christmas parties, deeming this an unseemly year for corporate celebration.

But just because the economy is in the tank, does this change the purpose of the holiday corporate party?

"Companies want to cut costs at the moment. But when times are hard you need leadership," says corporate psychologist Ben Williams. "It is about encouraging people and making them feel valued."

From The Financial Times: Tim Lindsay, London president of advertising agency TBWA, says the company believes cutting to the bone is not the answer. “We recognise that ad agencies are places where people don’t have their heads down all the time. You need room to play. Creating a relaxed, informal and enjoyable atmosphere is important, especially as ideas often come from unexpected places.” So, while TBWA’s festivities this year might be a little more modest, it will still be holding client and staff celebrations.

What's Up in Retail This Holiday Season? Not A Whole Lot, But There Are Some Shining Stars

Recently, there have been a lot of doom-and-gloom stories about the potentially disastrous holiday season for retailers. "Free fall," and  "devastation" are terms being bandied about to describe this year's holiday season for retailers (and consumers)--even before it starts!. Will "Black Friday" look more like "Black Monday?"

Here are a couple of excellent articles from Businessweek and The New York Times which take a less "the world is coming to an end" approach and deliver a few helpful suggestions for how retailers and consumers will weather this winter storm.

From Businessweek: Yes, Virginia, There is A Recession

With tight budgets and job jitters, kids are more apt to find tube socks than an Xbox under the tree.

Facing economic uncertainty, not to mention tighter credit, U.S. households are expected to scale back spending radically this year. As retailers brace for one of the slowest shopping seasons since the early 1990s, their focus has shifted to one area that promises to stay strong: kids' apparel. Chains such as Kohl's, J.C. Penney, and Macy's are gearing their advertising and in-store promotions toward children's clothing in a bid to garner what few discretionary dollars are being spent. Ellen Davis, a vice-president at the National Retail Federation, says that children's clothing may even outsell toys this year. "In previous years, that would have been a 'because you need it' purchase, not a gift," she says.

And for Walmart, after spending the last year or two scrambling to catch up to Target by being more about value than price, they see that the day of "price" may be returning:

From The New York Times: For Wal-Mart, a Christmas That’s Made to Order

Sales at department stores and specialty retailers are in free fall. They are cutting staff, discounting merchandise and closing stores to survive. But even as the financial turmoil strangled discretionary spending at many stores, it sent struggling consumers into the arms of Wal-Mart — and left it, the world’s largest retailer, poised for a blockbuster Christmas.

“In my mind, there is no doubt that this is Wal-Mart time,” H. Lee Scott Jr., the company’s president and chief executive, said recently at a meeting of analysts and investors in Wal-Mart’s hometown, Bentonville, Ark. Referring to the discount chain’s founder, he added, “This is the kind of environment that Sam Walton built this company for.”