This year’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis was the most watched television program in U.S. history, according to data from Nielsen. Participating brands all want to be a part of the swirl that is Super Bowl, including the week-long media frenzy prior to the game. However it takes experience and a keen strategy to be successful.
If your brand is part of the Super Bowl next year, here’s some advice from Super Bowl veterans on how your brand can successfully break through the enormous Super Bowl clutter.
- Choose a spokesperson with relevant credentials – Our client, Head & Shoulders, worked with Pittsburgh Steelers’ Brett (da’ Beard) Keisel, who is well known among media, players and fans alike for both his football skills and his amazing beard. Because of his trademark facial hair, brand mentions were weaved in organically during media interviews.
- Be strategic about the timing of your media schedule – Thursdays and Fridays are the busiest and most important media days; those are the days when shows book the biggest sports analysts and players to predict outcomes for the game. Those days are typically booked a week in advance so be mindful of that timing when you pitch. If your interest is in garnering brand mentions, book interviews earlier in the week when media are more flexible in what they cover.
- Leverage your sponsorships – If your brand is, for example, an ‘official’ sponsor of the NFL, there are many opportunities open to you – so take advantage of them. A key perk is access to Media Day, typically held on the Tuesday before Super Bowl when the teams are available to talk to media.
- Seek subtle branding opportunities – Ensure your spokesperson is wearing branded gear, especially when conducting TV interviews. It doesn’t have to be anything over the top — just a small logo on the breast pocket. This also reminds the interviewer why the spokesperson is there in the first place!
- Build in plenty of travel and planning time – Navigating around Super Bowl village is difficult, particularly if you are escorting a recognizable spokesperson. Allow for plenty of time and hire a driver who knows his/her way around the city to dodge any closed roads, traffic and fans. If you have a camera crew participating in Media Day, be sure to allow plenty of time for them to get a wireless frequency.
- Don’t get distracted from the main reason why you are at Super Bowl – If you are at Super Bowl as a brand representative, act accordingly! As a PR professional, your #1 goal is to garner media opportunities/impressions and mass attention for your brand. That means (unfortunately) that other brand’s events/parties, going out to fun dinners or even stargazing has to come second.
Image courtesy of The Frisky
On a recent trip from LA to New York, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a producer who makes movies for women. She is working to create a fund for the development of such movies, and shared her thinking and a fantastic presentation with some wonderful statistics. It clearly demonstrated how making movies that appeal to women translates into making movies that reach everyone in those women’s lives. It ended with a quote from Alfred Hitchcock that said, “Not only does a woman decide which movie a couple sees, but she decides what they thought of it.”
That got me thinking about how this axiom applies beyond the movies. The phrase “Marketing to Women” holds more than meets the eye. On its own, it can be limiting, and not fully inclusive of what it means to reach a woman and make a meaningful connection to her. Because once you have made a connection to a woman, you’ve not only made a connection to a potential sale – but ultimately decisions and actions that impact every other person that touches her life.
It s been well reported that women make 80 percent of the purchasing decisions for their households. It’s often the mom or the wife who makes the majority of household purchases, including food, personal care, beauty and grooming products for her whole family. Her values, and what appeals to her, is likely what is going to show up in the cart…as well as the minds and bodies of her family.
We’ve certainly seen that with through the breakthrough work that P&G did with the Old Spice commercials. The same is true in food marketing and the products she chooses to nourish and care for her family. If she believes in the product, on whatever level you are reaching her – value, performance, affiliation, prestige, community – she will show she believes in it with her wallet, and how she stocks her home.
“Kid tested, mom approved?” That brilliant claim subtly, yet directly, recognizes a woman’s power, and gives a wink acknowledging this brand knows who’s boss. So, no matter what the product you’re trying to sell, and no matter who it’s designed for, acknowledging and respecting what she wants in this product can go a long way to ensuring its adoption by her entire family.
Image courtesy of Get Social PR Blog
It seems like everybody is talking about what “the PR agency of the future” will look like. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m pretty certain about two things: the services offered will go far beyond what has traditionally been considered “PR”…and the future…is now. Already today’s public relations agency is morphing into an integrated communications firm driven by content generation, brand storytelling, entertainment services and both mainstream and online media. The changes in media and blurring of the lines between public relations, marketing, advertising, and digital have never happened with more dizzying velocity than they are right now. MMC’s newly created Creative Catalyst Group (CCG) was conceived to address our clients’ changing needs in this quickly evolving media environment.
We think this exciting new environment offers tremendous opportunity for our discipline because, more than ever, clients encourage collaboration across all agencies and welcome Big Ideas from whoever can put them forward. They also expect us to execute on those ideas, across all kinds of media. Our clients now look to us for everything from branded entertainment, to content generation, to real-time response on their Facebook pages. They want us to develop narratives for their brands that can unfold in their ad campaigns, be picked up in earned media, be celebrated at live interactive events and reverberate across consumer conversations, driven by super-engaged social media users. And yes…they still want to get on the Today Show.
Our discipline is uniquely positioned to tell the larger story that weaves through all brand communications, and in today’s media environment that story is best told with the expertise of specialists in every kind of media. That’s where CCG comes in. Just think about the life cycle of a “news” story today. The story that bubbles up in social media can end up on the evening news (and vice versa). And the line between paid media and earned is so blurred that a paid message can be delivered on a news broadcast, while the most valuable earned media can come from winning over a celebrity with a massive Twitter following. No longer can media relations people, social media experts, entertainment specialists and content creators work in silos, coming in after the creative process is over to provide “media strategy” for programs. Creativity is now an integrated process made leagues more strategic by specialists like those in our Creative Catalyst Group.
CCG experts live in a kind of “always-on” idea storm, fueled by our close connections to influencers at every level – bloggers, online and mainstream media, talk show producers, celebrities and talent agents. Because nearly half of us come from a media background we are also natural content creators. Cutting edge proprietary tools like our Influencer Mining Tool help us glean strategic insights about the “Influence-Hers” who are driving conversation online, and MMC’S “Eureka!” process helps us arrive at Big Ideas grounded in strategy.
Does all of this mean that our account teams don’t get involved in the creative process? Just the opposite. Some of the most creative minds in our agency reside within our account teams. The increased collaboration and cross pollination between CCG and all of our account teams simply adds a powerful multiplier to ideation, program creation and executional strategy. The job of the Creative Catalyst Group, as our name suggests, is to help spark creative thinking … because in the ‘integrated communications firm’ of the future… we ALL own creativity.
Image courtsey of the-descendants-movie-trailer.blogspot.com
As the Oscar race builds and we see yet another Clooney performance in The Descendants or interview about the movie, it should remind us all that post-launch promotion is just as important as launch. So often marketers blow it all at launch, but leave consumers at the most critical point… Marketers can underestimate the power of their own idea and switch gears on their consumers, driving the new, new, new. Well, how about driving exactly what you’ve got in a new way? Don’t change your concept; refresh it a million and one ways. Subscribe to the “fewer, bigger” approach.
Treat your timeline as though it were Red Carpet season. Build lifelong fans. Make your shareholders proud in the process.
And keep sending more Clooney, please.
Image courtesy of someecards
Was this ecard in your Facebook feed yesterday?
Today, John Lennon’s 1970s song “Power to The People” has meaning again. The People created an avalanche of social media protest when The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation (SGK) cut funds for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood earlier this week. No matter where you stood on the issue, it was The People who painted a picture of SGK as a polarizing charity and made many supporters re-assess their continued sponsorship. It was The People who contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Planned Parenthood – funds it wouldn’t otherwise have received. And it was The People (more women than men, but you gotta love Michael Bloomberg), powered by social media, who incentivized SGK earlier today to reverse its funding decision.
And the best part? Because of the speed and reach of social media this all happened in two days.
Have people used social media to effect change before? They sure have. There was that little thing called the Arab Spring. And last summer, women in Saudi Arabia mobilized on social networking sites to demand their right to drive. This sparked worldwide media coverage and support from female politicians and diplomats in the U.S. and Europe.
The enormous power of social media still thrills me. Maybe because I remember the laboriously slow pace and even threat of danger of the old fashioned protests. How would social media have affected other well-known protests such as the Vietnam War in the 1960s or the HIV/AIDS protests in the 1980s?
Looking forward, there’s one thing of which I’m certain: we are past the time when social issues that large groups of people are passionate about can be swept under the rug or put on hold until next month’s board meeting. Everything happens in real time. And as public relations people, we need to be prepared to react in real time.
Image Courtesy of Carlos Latuff
The Huffington Post published a photo essay today on what they deemed The 50 Best Moments for Women in 2011. Turns out there were a lot of reasons to celebrate women’s progress in many areas, including politics, media, the arts, athletics and more.
I encourage you to click through all of it. But if you don’t have time, here are a few highlights about women’s progress in media that I thought were particularly noteworthy.
- Social networking scores a victory in Saudi Arabia. No, this wasn’t another Arab Spring – it was a campaign for women’s rights in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Women2Drive was created to demand women’s right to drive after a 32-year-old female engineer was arrested for driving. The campaign demonstrated the dramatic impact of social networking sites, as it sparked worldwide media coverage and support from female politicians and diplomats in the U.S. and Europe. While women have not won the right to drive, Saudi’s King Abdullah did grant them the right to vote in elections for the first time, moving women’s progress one small step forward.
- Despite widely available information online, generations of women still turn to the same women’s health reference book. In 2011, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” (OBOS), the iconic and widely-circulated women’s health reference book, celebrated its 40th birthday. Published by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1971, when health information was hard to come by, this book helped launch the women’s health movement. Forty years later, despite the surfeit of online information, OBOS remains a go-to resource for women of all ages – from Boomers to Millennials and Generation Z.
- The first ad featuring lesbians airs on national TV. Kudos to KY, the personal lubricant brand, which aired a commercial featuring a lesbian couple sitting on their bed talking about using KY Intense, a new product designed for women because “they say it makes sex more satisfying.” Add this breakthrough to 2011’s passage of New York’s Same Sex Marriage Act and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act signed in December of 2010 and I’d say the LGBT community had a pretty good year!
- Social Media may thwart another “Oprah Effect.” HuffPo notes that while Oprah single-handedly influenced how millions of women thought and talked about their lives, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have so democratized media that “it’s nearly impossible for any one person to have that much control over any conversation again.”
There’s a lot more great stuff in this article, including not one, but two mentions of Ryan Gosling, who was the subject of more buzz than he probably wanted in 2011. You’ll have to go to the site to find out why. Or just check out this blog to find out more about his, um, feminist side.
Happy New Year!
MMC client Head & Shoulders, which has been working with Pittsburgh Steelers spokesman Troy Polamalu for several years, expanded its hair roster to include two more Pittsburgh Steelers – Brett Keisel and Hines Ward. In media interviews today, the two new spokesmen discussed what it’s like to be legendary on and off the field and their new Head & Shoulders commercial, which also features Polamalu. Keisel and Ward urged fans to check out the Head & Shoulders for Men Facebook page to enter the Legendary 7 Contest.
Photo credit: Head & Shoulders’ YouTube Channel
