On Break…

Since January of 2006, every week, without fail, I’ve published the State of the Brand. The blog software I use says that translates to 295 consecutive posts over almost five-and-a-half years. (Okay, I did have a guest writer once, but I still think it has been a pretty good run.)

 

Some articles I am very proud of, and more than I’d like to admit now make me cringe. But above all that, I’ve been most proud of not missing a beat. I’ve very much appreciated the kind comments and encouragement along the way—they help me shake off the sometimes-deserved, sometimes-not ugly criticism that’s part of playing this game.

 

There’s no specific reason for a break now other than that I need to focus on finishing up the coursework for my MA at the University of Minnesota. A little recharge on the creative blogging front won’t hurt either. I’m not exactly sure when I’ll resume, but it won’t be before June 15 when I present to my degree review committee.

 

In the meantime, now’s the time for suggestions and critique. For most articles, I don’t receive much feedback. That’s okay of course, but it doesn’t really tell me what’s appreciated or what you’d like me to write about. Over the years, I’ve primarily used this column as a way for me to make sense of my world. Along the way, maybe it’s helped you, too. But I get the sense now that it may be time to rethink it.

 

So you tell me. Should I write less, more often? More, more often? More in-depth and less often? Should I let others tell the story for a while?

 

For the next six or seven weeks, I’ll (finally) shut up and listen.

 

State of the Brand will no longer be hosted by TCBmag.com. Following his above-mentioned hiatus, Jason Voiovich will maintain his blog at stateofthebrand.com, where previous posts are also available.

Duets: Double the Benefit, Double the Risk

Key points:

1. Better than 25 percent of today’s American Top 40 feature collaborative efforts.

2. Clearly, the producers believe that strategic partnerships make sense in an era of single-track focus and fragmented audiences.

3. But the strategy isn’t without risks to the brand image of both artists in question.

Sadly, my boys are at the age where they are listening to popular music.

My attempts to indoctrinate them to the Beatles, the Eagles, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Morning Edition, and—heaven forbid—Car Talk, have failed. I’m now subjected to a repeated barrage of top-40 hits from something called “Lady Gaga,” Enrique Iglesias (what happened to Julio?), and Ke$ha (I don’t understand why it’s spelled that way either).

On a recent trip to the Y (not the YMCA anymore, sigh), I couldn’t help but wonder why every song during the 15-minute drive featured more than one artist. To make sure I wasn’t witnessing some KDWB anomaly, I checked the American Top 40 Web site. A quick scan confirmed my suspicion: Eleven of the top 40 songs were collaborations—more than 25 percent.

I certainly remember the occasional collaboration in the 1980s and 1990s—Aerosmith and Run DMC’s “Walk this Way” comes to mind—but nothing approaching one in four. The curmudgeon in me is inclined to believe that the reason behind all of the “collaboration” is a distinct lack of talent. But as someone who grew up with glam rock, I’m not in a position to make that judgment.

I think the fragmentation of the music industry—and audience—has more to do with the uptick in collaborative top 40 hits than any other factor. Until the proliferation of Napster and iTunes, the “album” and huge audiences dominated the music industry. It wasn’t profitable to address niche groups, and those artists received little if any exposure. In other words: big albums, big artists, big tours, big hits, and big money.

Digital music changed all that. Not only did it make the creation and distribution of music cheaper, it also broke apart the album as the central unit of music promotion. If you could buy only the song you liked for 99 cents, why would you drop $16 for the other 11 songs? The net effect was a much more hit-driven industry on one hand, and narrower slices of audiences on the other. To summarize: more artists, smaller hits, more fragmented audiences.

So what’s an artist to do? Especially one who wants the big money? Take a page out of the MBA playbook: strategic partnerships.

From a producer’s perspective, examine the image needs and audience dynamics for a particular proposal. Let’s say the boy band Big Time Rush needs to burnish a bit more of a bad boy image. Solution: strategic partnership with Snoop Dog to add an urban edge. Let’s say Eminem’s audience could use more of a female demographic to boost sales. Solution: strategic partnership with Rihanna. In branding terms, we call this “borrowing equity.” Each artist benefits from the association in a tangible way.

That’s not to say artistic collaboration, for its own sake, is dead. But 25 percent—and growing—doesn’t seem congruent with the psyche of ego-driven pop artists. They are being managed into collaboration.

But that’s the upside. What’s the risk?

For starters, the concept of the individual tour is dead if a healthy percentage of your hits involve some other artist. Perhaps that’s why we see so many more collaborative tours. More artists, more value for the (overpriced) ticket.

Perhaps the larger issues involve the inherent risks with strategic partnerships. As we learn in MBA land, the challenges in such relationships are profound: cultural mismatches, audience mismatches, creative disagreements, and the potential denigration of the brand persona.

In other words, what do parents think about their 10-year-old listening to Big Time Rush on Nickelodeon when they see Snoop Dog surrounded by his, uh, “women”? What do Rihanna listeners think about the images of spousal abuse in Eminem’s other lyrics, given her past?

Suffice to say, it’s complicated, and it seems to have little to do with making music.

Related articles:
American Top 40

March Madness Viewing Is a Team Sport

Key points:

1. NCAA tournament viewership data revealed (for the first time in stark measurable terms) what we instinctively knew already: A significant share of viewers take in the games outside the home.

2. This 20 percent figure may hold true for other events—sports for sure, but also award shows, contests, and other real (not “reality”) dramas.

3. We must think differently about the situational behaviors of viewers in communal environments versus the home—they might not respond the same way to messaging.

I happened to be in San Diego during the beginning of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. And I was there with someone very emotionally invested in the fate of the Ohio team.

Like with every trade show, the hotel bar was packed with impromptu business meetings, booth workers burning off steam, and vacationers wondering what the heck we were all doing there. But every television was tuned to a different Division I game—and there were a lot of onlookers.

I later found out, we were not alone.

AdWeek reported this week that Arbitron data showed “out-of-home” viewing boosted the overall March Madness numbers by 20 percent. What’s better: Those increases hit the all-important 18–49 male demographic.

Out-of-home viewing includes hotels and bars (like the Hilton in San Diego), as well as all manner of restaurants and other common areas. I won’t bore you with the details of how the data are collected, but it’s reasonably complicated and error prone, although getting better. Advertisers have always known intuitively that large sports events are communal draws, but they finally have the data to back it up.

What does that mean in dollars? CBS took in $613.8 million during the tournament for a reach of 10.2 million viewers, making each viewer worth just over $60. Put another way, out-of-home viewing accounted for over $122 million of the take.

Those are solid numbers. A few years ago, I wrote about Nielsen On Location media, which was the first major effort to pin down the market for viewership at hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and gas stations. At the time, this was a $1.3 billion market, with advertisers putting money into the media without really having decent measurables. Now we do, and the market for this media type is taking off. (Geolocation advertising enabled by the growth of smart phones certainly has helped.)

The March Madness figures finally provide a way to quantify a behavior that the advertising community always knew was true: Human beings are social animals. We want to experience media with other people—in this case, 20 percent of the time.

But I think we can be even more specific.

Advertisers would really like to know what types of programming are likely to draw the most out-of-home viewing. And if we know that, where are they and how do we better target them with relevant products and services?

I’ll take a stab at this one. March Madness was able to grab a 20 percent share outside the home because it is, fundamentally, a shared experience. With the proliferation of instant media updates, if I can’t watch the game, I can keep up with the score and the highlights. But that misses the experiential nature of the game—I don’t see the inherent drama, the missed shots, the flow of the game. Those are all things we don’t want to time-shift: Once you know the final score, some of the magic is gone.

We want to experience it while it’s happening. And ideally, many of us want to experience it in the company of others. Major sporting events are an obvious draw (the measurable success of pay-per-view boxing is another example of this concept), but I think we can expand it beyond sports. Any programming event where knowing the outcome in advance completely ruins the drama falls into this category—awards shows, contests like American Idol, etc. Even the last episode of Seinfeld. Anything that becomes an “event.” Not a “psuedo-event”—i.e., the season finale of CSI Miami, or “reality” TV—but real, unscripted drama.

If the 20 percent share holds for these types of events, we need to rethink that sub-component of our audience. Let’s say the audience for a PPV boxing event is primarily male, college educated, 25–45. What might be different about the 1/5 of that audience viewing communally? For one, if I were advertising a product or service they might want (but might be ashamed to admit it—male enhancement, anyone?), you can write off 20 percent of the audience who might not associate a certain level of embarrassment with your product. You could also envision the opposite scenario, where 20 percent of your audience might be more attune to a new microbrew. In fact, they might be inclined to ask for it on the spot! Talk about measurability.

These numbers reveal a new layer to examine during the media buying process—situation-specific media consumption—in which a significant portion of your target audience might behave (or not behave) like you expect.

It seems like the more data we get, the more complex a picture emerges. Good luck to us all.

Related links:
AdWeek Exclusive: Bar, Hotel Viewing Lifts March Madness Numbers 20%
Your Hotel Television Is Watching . . . You

HealthPartners, Virtuwell, and Hypercompetition

Key points:

1. With a decent amount of marketing hoopla, HealthPartners launched Virtuwell.

2. The effort could be seen as an example of “hypercompetition.”

3. HealthPartners has a long way to go to clarify its menu of health care options.

Sunny Minnesota spring day. Two boys playing outside. The younger one comes in screaming in pain. The older one screaming, “I didn’t do anything.” Ah, another joy of raising boys.

Turns out it really wasn’t my older one’s fault. Over the winter, our new retaining wall went through one too many freeze/thaw cycles. A chunk of six blocks gave way, hitting my younger son’s toe on the way down. Ouch.

While my wife found the ice pack, I hit the HealthPartners Web site. Boy, had things changed since I’d last visited. In addition to hospitals, specialty clinics, and urgent care, I had a new choice: Virtuwell, an online diagnosis tool.

Virtuwell seems like the perfect option for things like sore throats, flu, lice, and pink eye. But no “bricks hit foot” option. Darn.

While waiting at St. Paul’s urgent care clinic, I had time to give this some thought.

What does Virtuwell mean for HealthPartners? Isn’t an online option sapping business away from its clinics and ER? How is this an alternative to Minute Clinic and Target Clinic? Is this an example of so-called “hypercompetition”? That’s a strategy scenario—usually reserved for technology companies—in which the dominant player in a market innovates its own replacement products and services before a competitor does it for them.

In one sense, I think that’s what’s happening. The traditional health care service model is beset on all sides with formidable opponents. You’ve got insurers putting downward pressure on fees, an uncertain regulatory environment, anger over system abuse and increased premiums, and the Targets and CVS’s of the world getting into the easy-care business (and some of HealthPartners’ profits).

It comes down to this: Health care providers must find the best delivery model, at the lowest cost, that provides the best measurable outcomes. The one that can innovate the fastest wins.

We can also understand the health care delivery model based on the engagement need of the patient. Everyone going to a hospital emergency room for minor ailments is a tremendously expensive way to deliver care—just ask HCMC. So hypercompetition could be in play here, but it’s more likely that we’re seeing technology finally enable a complete delivery model.

The chart below summarizes the different options by engagement level.

Through Virtuwell, HealthPartners is using technology to fill in the far end of the engagement chain: common conditions, easy diagnoses, and typical prescriptions.

On the other end of the spectrum are high-engagement options: specialty care and hospice. Next to them are the hospital systems. Then the clinics. Then the urgent care centers. Then a missing option: in-retail clinics. Then Virtuwell.

From a cost and delivery perspective, it’s an impressive model. But from a branding perspective, it is clear health care consumers really don’t yet understand how to choose.

What incentive do consumers with insurance have to choose the cheapest option? They’ll choose the most convenient. Uninsured consumers wait until they have an emergency, or they’ll choose the retail clinics with easy-to-understand price menus. The common denominator is confusion. As consumers, we’ve complained about health care costs and services, but we are loath to engage with our options more fully.

Virtuwell is a good start from a delivery model perspective—and it makes sense in terms of hypercompetition. But in the short term, it adds another layer of confusion to a crowded set of options.

To get the return on investment it needs, HealthPartners must to do a better job helping us understand how to choose from its menu of care options. It will be hard work, but unless that’s clear, I’m not sure it will be successful.

(As a parting note, the younger boy turned out fine. Nothing broken. Whew.)

Firing Crispin Won’t Save the King

Key points:

1. After six consecutive losing quarters, Burger King ousted long-time agency Crispin Porter.

2. Although the agency pulled off some impressive campaigns, they never settled on a theme.

3. But it’s hard to say any amount of advertising would fix Burger King’s core demographic problem.

Agencies get this kind of news all the time: Their corporate account “wants to go in a new direction,” “wants some fresh creative vision,” or any of the other hundred euphemisms that all mean the same thing: You’re fired.

Last week, we learned Miami agency Crispin Porter got the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech from fast-food giant Burger King. (Officially, it was a “mutual agreement” to part ways. Mutual. Right.)

During a nearly eight-year run, the pair launched a series of groundbreaking, somewhat interesting, and occasionally downright bizarre ad concepts. Remember “Whopper Virgins”? Remote Thai villagers, who had never had a burger, were given the choice between McDonald’s and Burger King. But the real classic was The King, a human character in a creepy mask who served as a jolly mascot, engaging in all sorts of quirky misadventures.

The underlying goal of BK’s advertising over the past half-decade or so was pretty simple: Unseat McDonald’s as the number one burger maker. And they didn’t even get close. In fact, BK has lost money in each of the last six quarters.

After 3G Capital bought the chain six months ago and installed a new CEO and chief marketing officer, Crispin getting the axe didn’t come as a surprise.

From an advertising perspective, Burger King is left with finding its “hook.” What’s the foundation of its marketing efforts? The food in general? “Flame-grilled”? The Whopper? Some variant on the King? A direct assault on McDonald’s? Crispin and BK never really answered that question. They never stuck to an idea and drove it home a la McDonald’s “Just Lovin’ It” anthem—which nailed it.

From a demographic perspective, Burger King’s target audience really isn’t McDonald's target audience, even though they produce the same general menu. McDonald’s has a broad swatch of regular customers, but its core demographic is parents with small children. That’s why its advertising is so brilliant: By harkening back to the good feelings parents had visiting the restaurant with their parents, they want to share those feelings with their kids. Pair that with heavily advertised Happy Meal toys and (sadly, often) the only viable indoor playground in town, and you have a winning formula.

As much as it might lust after that demographic, Burger King doesn’t really connect with young parents. Its target demographic is the oft-coveted 18- to 25-year-old single male. The group has plenty of discretionary income, few responsibilities, and little concern for long-term health—perfect for a 1500-calorie fat bomb at Burger King.

But this is a perfect transition into what I think is the core problem with Burger King: poor differentiation within a quickly-evolving fast food marketplace. Put simply, there are more (and better) competitors today for the young male’s fast food dollar than there were even five years ago.

In the 1980s and ’90s, if you wanted fast food, what were your choices? McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Arby’s, KFC, Taco Bell, and a few others. In that market, you could reasonably attempt to carve a sizable chunk of the buying audience.

That all changed with Subway. Now surpassing McDonald’s in global restaurants, Subway gave even the 18–25 male demographic a viable alternative. Since then, several other competitors have filled the “high-end” fast food space—think Chipotle and Smashburger.

Traditional fast food giants BK, Wendy’s, and Arby’s find themselves in a pickle: Try to go down market and you run into the McDonald’s juggernaut. Try to improve food quality, and you run into the clearly better class of higher-end fast food (which never had to shed a “99-cent value menu” image).

Financial results at Burger King (and Wendy’s and Arby’s), show they have yet to figure out a clear answer. And I’m not sure this is a problem any amount of advertising can solve. Fundamentally, advertising must work with what’s already there. Contrary to popular belief, we are not magicians—we can’t create a stable image of a company that can’t fulfill that promise.

If we do, it’s likely to fall apart. Crispin tried. I don’t think they ever had a chance.