SoBe Life Water and Michael Jackson: What's the Connection?

PepsiCo's SoBe Life Water commercials featuring lizards and supermodel Naomi Campbell dancing to the Michael Jackson hit "Thriller" begs the question: why?

What has dancing lizards have to do with SoBe Life Water? Well, not much. Supposedly these new flavors of water are "Thrillicious," prompting the SoBe people to reenact the killer "Thriller" music video. The 25th anniversary of the album "Thriller" occurred this year, so SoBe got a piece of that action by using the famous song. According to a press release by Dave DeCecco of PepsiCo, "As evidenced by results of several Super Bowl ad polls, SoBe Life Water made a huge connection with consumers. Three of the top Super Bowl surveys ranked the SoBe Life Water Thrillicious spot as among the best commercial moments. Leading the way, SoBe was tied for the 10th most liked spot in the USA Today Ad Meter consumer poll -- the highest ranking of any non-carbonated beverage advertising during the game. The Thrillicious spot also hit the top 10 in TiVo's list which measured second-by-second audience data. On the web, AOL's Super Bowl survey has the SoBe Life Water spot in its top 5 picks by consumers."

Really? I understand SoBe's brand identifier is the lizard, but why would dancing lizards make me thirsty? This commercial drew disdain from CampaignCritics.com, which stated: Rather than endorsing the product with a dancing lizard ... how about advertising a celebrity athlete who chooses refreshing Life Water (ever hear of Gatorade?) over other beverages? The demonstration of functionality instead of hype resonates more with consumers, who are making smarter health-conscious decisions and aren't falling for the hype anymore."

Of course, some might argue that SoBe is using a campaign made up of time-proven techniques:

- It has a famous person: men love Naomi Campbell, and women want to look like her.
- It has animals: people love animals that don't act like animals. I'd rather see animals of the fuzzy and cute variety rather than a reptile, but that's just me. Either way, people like to see dancing animals.
- It has a memorable, make that iconic, song: duh!
- It has dancing: apparently, we love dancing, since Dancing with the Stars is still airing. Although I'm not sure how...

SoBe's trying to catch up to Vitamin Water, which is now owned by Coke, and we all know those two have to compete every chance they get! But, hey, whether you love the commercial or hate it, it did create buzz. People know what the commercial is for, and they remember seeing it. And that's what creating a good ad is all about, right?

VisualAd Advertising Platform: Innovative or Scary?

"Eyealike VisualAd is the world's first image and video-based contextual advertising platform for social networks and rich media websites. With a unique ability to recognize facial features, skin color, hair, gender and age as well as objects like logos or product images, Eyealike VisualAd can serve highly targeted ads based on the context of online images and videos. The proprietary approach is similar to Google's AdWords model, but based solely on an automated method that quickly indexes, filters and classifies images and videos rather than relying on keywords to place targeted ads alongside rich media.”

I got the first paragraph straight from Eyealike’s Web site because I didn’t think I could explain VisualAd any clearer.

Eyealike’s VisualAd platform can recognize people with 90 percent accuracy – quite impressive for a computer. In a press release from October 13, the day that VisualAd was unveiled to the world, Sue Feldman, IDC's Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies, said, “Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today. Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue.

Eyealike's ability to automatically tag and classify images based on the image, not the keywords, should result in matching more ads to images, and also improve the match based on the actual image. This is an approach that could help increase the ad revenue for websites with visual assets.”

Although VisualAd is similar to Google AdWords, the amount of money that can be made is much higher. Many large social networking sites have low CPM rates, from 8 cents to 12 cents per thousand views. VisualAd’s goal is to make those same sites now worth $2 to $20 and up by increasing CPMs.

The VisualAd technology not only recognizes faces, but logos as well. If you have a pic of yourself with a Nike shirt on with the swoosh logo, VisualAd knows that you’re more likely to respond to a Nike ad displayed on your page.

When it comes to faces, the technology can spy an infant in your arms or the same infant in a multitude of pictures on your profile and assume that you need a Gerber item or a Huggies item. A financial services firm can conclude you might be interested in setting up a 529 college savings account for your little bundle of joy. Thus, seeing all of this info in a picture on a social networking site allows for more targeted ads.

This is definitely innovative – no one can argue that – but is it scary, a little too Big Brother-like?

Print and Mail Services: Are They Worth It?

The concept of a print and mail service is simple: you send a digital ad file to a company that will print and mail your ad, usually along with many others to make up a packet of ads, and the company will use their own mailing list for your ad. Bam! – thousands of new clients, just like that. You pay them one fee and they do all the work. If you use a few services at a time, you could potentially mail your ad to thousands of prospective buyers within weeks.

Sounds good, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work quite that smoothly.

Many print and mail companies don’t have a high level of return on the offers they churn out. I say churn because these companies often take as many advertisers as they can without care about the quality of the ad presentation. That means that you’d have to reach tens of thousands of people to get the same return on your offer that you would if you mailed out your postcard or print ad yourself. If you get a 3 percent return from mailing your offer by itself, you can expect to get about .5 percent return if you use a print and mail company, and oftentimes it’s even lower than that.

Why Such a Low Return?

The reasons for the low return rate are speculation from many differing Web sites and marketing experts. No one has done any official research into why the print and mail companies have such a low return rate. Here are a few reasons:

They have a non-targeted mailing list. For products or services that only a chosen population needs, a print and mail company’s list won’t do just because it’s not targeted. The list might be geographically targeted, but that’s about it. The mailing list is one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial, part of a successful direct mail campaign. Your ad can’t do any good if you don’t get it into the hands of the people who are likely to be interested in it.

Poor quality materials. Many print and mail companies use the thinnest paper they can and don’t use quality inks or quality printers. Many of the ads come out looking amateurish or even worse, smudged from the printer.

Double-sided printing. To cut costs and make a bigger profit, many print and mail companies will use double-sided printing, with two ads on one piece of paper. This makes the consumer have to choose between the two ads if there are coupons on each side: which one will the consumer give up? There’s a good chance it’ll be yours unless your product or service appeals to everyone, which is pretty hard to do.

Dishonesty in number delivered. There is no way of knowing if the company actually sends out as many ad packets as they say they do. If the company says it’ll charge only $3 per 100 ads sent out, how do you know that they are actually sending out 100 ads? Many companies cut costs and pocket profit by sending out a smaller number of ads than promised.

With all of these negatives associated with print and mail services, it’s smart to research the company before you hand over any of your hard earned money. Your best bet is to look for complaints on forums and Web sites and to compare the price of the print and mail service with the separate prices of using an online printing company (which is generally cheaper than an offline printing company) and mailing the ads yourself. It might take some time, but time is money and you don’t want to waste either element.

Are Brochures Best for a Service-Based Business?

When a customer or prospect calls your customer service department to get some information, is your first gut instinct to say “Thanks for the call. Let me send you our brochure for more information.”?

But is a brochure really the best answer for a service-based business? Not always and here’s why.

When a prospect contacts you, this is a great chance to show your knowledge and understanding of your industry and your services. By speaking with the customer directly, you can help your customer make a more informed decision about your services. With service-based businesses, developing trust with your customers is crucial to the success of your business. Customers must feel as though you know what you’re talking about. Customers don’t want to get service from a Joe-Schmoe who doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.

Brochures are often about the “why” and “what” of a product or service. A brochure does not invoke trust.

Brochures are also too hard to fill with targeted info. If people just want prices and not detailed product descriptions, is pretty hard to fill an entire brochure with just prices.

What can you use instead of brochures?

Marketing a service-based business requires more thought than a product-based business. You don’t have a product to show, but you can show before-and-after results of your service, and you could give out handy info that customers are most likely looking for. Also, by giving customers info they’re looking for, you become a trusted expert, which helps bump that trust level up more.

So instead of a brochure, or in conjunction with a brochure, give your customers:

• A fact sheet: a 1-page sheet on why a certain problem occurs and how you can fix it.
• An informational sheet: a 1- or 2-page sheet that gives facts about your company, including success stories, history, testimonials and maybe even case studies. Only include info that the customer will want, not facts that will simply toot your own horn.
• A checklist: a list of all of your services, broken out into categories of when which service is needed to help customers determine which services they really need now.
• A folder or postcard with important info related to your business jotted on it. (An accountant could put tax rates or important tax dates on a postcard for customers to keep handy.)

All of these alternatives to brochures are less expensive than printing brochures and you can customize all of these for each customer easily. By creating a fact sheet for each type of problem you can help with, you send out only those fact sheets that people need.

By using these informative alternatives to brochures, you’ll be trusted by your customers and seen as an expert. Brochures have their place, but in service-oriented businesses, brochures can’t be your only marketing piece. When someone needs more info on a specific problem, you can impress that prospect by sending her just the specific information she was looking for.

Tourism Brochures: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

When you think of tourism, you think of brochures. Right? When you go to a tourists’ center or a visitors’ center in a new town, the first thing you’ll see is a big rack of brochures. People don’t want to spend time in a tourists’ center – they want to get out and about and look at a brochure as they’re on their way to the tourist destination.

You must plan your tourism brochures to focus on one place, feature or region – trying to cram 12 sites into one brochure won’t allow sufficient space for the destination details and benefits. Don’t lose money by short-changing your tourism brochures. Be aware of the mistakes you need to avoid to create good brochures:

Mistake 1: Making your brochure your only sales tactic. A brochure should be part of your marketing plan; it shouldn’t be your entire marketing plan. You still need a Web site as well as other sales materials, like sales letters, postcards and flyers. Get your marketing materials to your prospects while they are still at home, mulling over where to go on vacation. Your brochure coupled with your sales letter and a visit to your Web site is much more convincing than just your brochure alone.

Mistake 2: Not using headlines. People skim brochures. Only a small percentage of people actually read all of the words in a brochure. People look to the headlines to guide them to the

competition. Give people a reason to stay with you over “the other guy.” Do you include a breakfast info they want. If the headlines don’t have the wanted info (or if there are no headlines at all), the person will throw away the brochure. Give the reader clear, enticing headlines to point them in the direction they need to go.

Mistake 3: Only listing a few of your destination’s attractions. If you don’t include a complete list, the reader will assume you don’t have that attraction. If your site includes a pool and an entrance into a lake, include both. Family members may have different preferences – a couple people prefer the pool, others prefer the lake. Don’t take it for granted that people will only want one or the other. Don’t clutter your brochure with attractions, but do include as many as you can. Using short, clear descriptions formatted in a bulleted list is an easy way to include a lot of info without overwhelming the reader.

Mistake 4: Not telling people how you differ from your competitors. You need a unique selling proposition (USP) that sets you apart from your buffet that no one else does? Do you have free transportation to a destination that others charge for? Be sure to let readers know. If your customer service has earned awards that none of your competitors have won, play that up in all of your marketing materials. That’s a great USP right there!

Mistake 5: Using text only. You have to use photos in a tourism brochure. There’s just no way around it. People want to see where they’re going. They want to envision themselves at the destination. You know the old cliché about what a picture is worth; clichés are clichés because they are true. Don’t make this important mistake. This could be crucial to your sales, so always include a photo.