Advertising – Page 11 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Will a Farting Penguin Make Your Advertising Better?

I recently met a retailer whose television and radio commercials feature a farting penguin.

Penguins can sell — Photo by Piumadaquila/dpc

The ads are amusing — I laughed the first time I saw one — and when customers come into the store the penguin is a great conversation starter.

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But many customers who laugh at the ads may not be coming in at all. Here’s where the campaign is running into trouble:
Little attention is given to the benefits the product delivers.
The store is in a remote, hard-to-find location, but the ads don’t give viewers any help in finding it.
The “Directions” link on the store’s website — a hugely important component under the circumstances — is difficult to find on the home page, and difficult to read.

There’s no way to put a hard number on it, but I am convinced that there are many potential customers who enjoy the penguins and never take the next step in the purchase process.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy was once asked about various techniques — online and offline — that marketers use to get people to pay attention. Here’s his take:

You’ve got to put people on a track with borders on it, that keeps them from wandering off in any direction, and moves them from beginning to end to a sale. If you show ‘em a dancing bear, and the dancing bear causes them to keep moving forward along the path to a sale, then the dancing bear is a good thing… If they’re so fascinated with the dancing bear that they stop moving forward in the sales presentation just to enjoy the bear, then the bear is a bad thing.”

For an event like the Super Bowl, the case can be made that the normal rules should be suspended — it’s the one time that everyone drops their filters and pays close attention. Perhaps the water-cooler talk that a funny Super Bowl ad generates is more valuable than a coherent sales message.

Budweiser and Coke have earned a free pass with decades of relentless marketing: everyone already knows exactly what their products are and how to buy them.

Local advertising hasn’t earned that luxury. It needs to sell first and entertain later. Humor, sound effects, snazzy graphics and farting penguins are only appropriate if they help compel your customers to do business with you.

Be careful with the penguin.

[reminder]

A Good Story Will Outsell All Your Facts

Facts tell, but stories sell” — Jim Doyle

It’s amusing to watch the political left and right — especially those at the extremes — argue each other. Each side has its own set of facts. Each is firmly convinced that if the other side just accepted these facts the argument would be over.

And each believes that the other side’s “facts” are lies.

[bctt tweet=”Those of us who work in marketing and sales are in the persuasion business.”]

In 2011, Seth Godin discussed “The Limits of Evidence-Based Marketing”, using as an example an acquaintance who is firmly convinced that the vaccine for polio is harmful. Stacks of information and studies from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization — “evidence-based marketing” — would not change the acquaintance’s mind.

“…evidence isn’t the only marketing tactic that is effective. In fact, it’s often not the best tactic. What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they’ve changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It’s not easy or fast, but it happens.”

Four years after Godin wrote those words, a measles outbreak briefly got the attention of some the public and some state legislatures. The hook wasn’t necessarily the re-emergence of a disease that had been nearly eradicated. Plenty of scientists had been predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later.

The hook was that the outbreak was linked to Disneyland. A story of measles at the Happiest Place on Earth was much more powerful than all of the statistics about herd immunity combined.

A similar phenomenon occurred during the Ebola epidemic last year. It wasn’t the thousands of deaths overseas that got America’s attention — it was a nurse climbing onto an airplane. When it became known that Amber Vinson had flown from Dallas to Cleveland and back again after being infected, panic ensued.

Schools were closed in Cleveland, kids from Rwanda were banned from a school in New Jersey, and parents in Mississippi took their children out of school because their principal had traveled to Zambia.

Zambia and Rwanda are thousands of miles away from the Ebola hot spots, but no matter. The story out-persuaded the facts.

Those of us who work in marketing and sales are in the persuasion business.

That’s why testimonial advertising works so well, and why I advise the television salespeople I coach to replace the charts and graphs with stories of clients who’ve used the station and won.

[reminder]

How You Can (Still) Get Free Advertising on Facebook

As Facebook’s organic reach – the free publicity a business used to be able to get on its “fan page” – drops to near zero, a technique I wrote about a couple of years ago becomes even more powerful.

In 2013 I met with with the owner of an upscale ladies boutique in the southeast. Although the store sold all manner of women’s clothing, the largest revenue driver was shoes.

The conversation had just turned to social media, and I asked the owner how effective the store Facebook page was as a marketing tool. “It’s okay, I guess,” he said. “But I found a much better way to use Facebook.”

He had my attention.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Most of my customers have smartphones. Whenever a customer tries on a pair of shoes and decides to buy them, we ask if they’d like us to take their picture… using their phone. Women like to show off their new shoes, so most of them say yes.”

“Do they let you post those pictures on your Facebook page?” I asked. “Some do, but I don’t really care about that,” he replied.

What makes this work is that as soon as they go home, they post that picture on their own Facebook page. And they usually mention that they got the shoes at my store.

That means that we just got a free Facebook ad, and it gets seen by 500 of my customer’s friends. Two or three times a week, someone will walk into my store and ask to try on a pair of shoes that their friend posted on Facebook. All of this costs us nothing – we don’t even pay for the camera!”

The store owner had stumbled on a great way to use Facebook in its most effective form – to accelerate word-of-mouth.

Here’s what’s happened in the two years since we had a conversation:

Facebook has made it harder and harder for a business to reach its fans without paying for advertising.
Americans’ love affair with the selfie has grown stronger.

Happy customers love to show off the things they just bought… on social media. The boutique owner I spoke to uses this to get free Facebook exposure. So can you.

It’s a technique that can be used in a variety of retail settings:

A window company can take pictures of a homeowner posing in front of her newly‐installed windows.
A car dealer can shoot a photo of a happy couple standing next to the new SUV they just bought.
A furniture store can take pictures of a customer’s new couch, in the customer’s home.

The key is to take the picture with the customer’s phone, not yours.

Jay Baer put it this way on the Convince and Convert blog:

If you want free reach, you need to do extraordinary, useful things…

You can’t fully replace your corporate Facebook program with this approach, but with reach evaporating for business pages, aren’t your employees and current customers and advocates now the very best way for you to distribute your message on Facebook?

As someone who has sold advertising and trained advertising salespeople for most of my adult life, I’m not about to condemn Facebook for doing what’s best for the company. They’ve got a business to run, and stockholders to serve.

Your best bet is to accept the reality, pay for advertising when you must, and use existing human behavior to your advantage.

[reminder]

How to Keep Your Clients Out Of Legal Trouble

It helps to ask the right questions before you work on an advertising campaign. Ignorance of the law has a way of coming back to haunt you.

Today’s Sales Training Lesson: How I Got Burned in a Presentation

Five years ago, I had a great promotion idea for an auto dealer in San Diego. The dealer was a baseball fan, his brand had a great fit with the sport, and I had a concept that was going to bring it all together.

The presentation got off to a great start, and I went through the details of the promotion flawlessly. I got to the end and asked for the commitment.

That’s when he dropped the bomb: “Nice idea, Phil. But it’s against the law to do a gift-with-purchase on a car sale in California.” Presentation over. Sale denied. It took me a while to get over that one.

It was embarrassing for me, but as an out-of-town consultant I wouldn’t necessarily be expected to know the laws of the state of California. But the account executive – a California resident – didn’t know the rules. And the sales manager – a California resident – didn’t know.

Frankly, we were lucky — somebody knew the law. It would’ve been much worse if the client had agreed to do the promotion, run a heavy advertising schedule on the station, and then gotten fined by California regulators.

Traveling the country, I frequently run into account executives and managers who don’t know the rules. In big picture terms, there are three common categories of pitfalls:

Financing Offers: the federal Truth in Lending Act has specific rules governing what you can and cannot say in a finance offer. The most common examples are credit offers for things like automobile and furniture sales. There are specific “TILA Trigger Terms” that require specific disclosures in an ad. In addition to the federal requirements, many states have their own laws regarding this.
Use of Copyrighted Material: It certainly sounds like a great idea to use one of today’s hit songs, or a classic rock tune, as the music bed for your commercial. Unfortunately, you can’t do that unless you have permission, and that permission involves paperwork and often an exchange of money. I ran into this all the time when I was a radio account executive, and it was easy for me then – I just wouldn’t let the client do it. In my current work I see this all the time. While I’m not surprised that, say, a furniture store owner doesn’t know what the rules are, I’m distressed at how many account executives, sales managers, and even production directors have no idea that they can’t do this… or don’t care.
Local Quirks: Dentists in the state of Texas are not allowed to do testimonial advertising. For other doctors this is okay, but not for dentists. As I mentioned earlier, auto dealers in some states can do a “gift-with-purchase” offer, while in other states they can’t. Each locality has its own goofy way of doing business, and you need to know your home states quirks.

[bctt tweet=”Know the rules. The right information can keep your client out of legal hot water.”]

Dan O’Day recently told the story of a radio market manager who knew it was against the law to use a hit song in an ad, and decided to “take his chances”. As O’Day pointed out: “That guy wasn’t taking just his chances. Everyone involved in a violation of someone’s copyright can be held liable — including the huge radio company that owned this guy’s cluster…and that had very deep pockets.”

Help Your Clients Keep The Advertising Legal

There are places you can go to learn the most important rules:

1. Local or state industry association or trade groups. Ask your client what groups he or she belongs to. Examples: for auto dealers, there may be someone you can talk to it at the New Car Dealers Association for your area. Most states also have a Real Estate Association.

2. Media organizations. For example, if you work in radio or TV, there is usually a state Association of Broadcasting.

3. Your own company’s legal department. This, of course, assumes that your company has one. But most of the big ones do, and they would prefer not to be sued. Talk to your manager and see if there is someone at Corporate who can help you.

4. Government regulators. There is probably someone at the state or local level in charge of consumer fraud issues. Your client may know who that is. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking.

A radio, TV, or digital sales rep is not an attorney, and no one expects you to be one. But you want to avoid nasty surprises whenever possible. A little knowledge can go a long way.

UPDATE 4-10-15: It is important to point out that I am not an attorney, and I’m not qualified to give legal advice. This is not legal advice. It is just… advice. If you want actual legal advice, the best thing to do is talk to an actual attorney.

[reminder]What’s the oddest legal quirk in your market?[/reminder]

5 Awesome Must-Read Blogs For Ambitious Media Salespeople

The best salespeople read constantly. Books, newspapers, newsletters, online courses… and blogs. We live in an age where there is an enormous amount of great information available for free about business, marketing, advertising, and sales.

Here is some required smartphone reading for anyone who works in media sales or advertising:

Photo courtesy Hubspot

Great Advertising, Marketing and Sales Blogs

Dan O’Day Talks about Radio — The ostensible subject is radio, but about 50% of the time he is talking about advertising, and what he says can apply to television, Internet, and other media just as well as radio. His Commercial Smackdowns, in which he gleefully dismantles a radio ad, are both instructive and a great deal of fun.
Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine — not technically a blog (he has one of those, too but rarely posts). You have to subscribe by email to get this. Gitomer, the author of dozens of sales books including Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, has been sending out these emails since 2001. He has been known to repeat himself, which is not surprising when you think about having to write 52 of these a year for 15 years. But he lives and breathes sales, has strong opinions, and knows what the heck he’s talking about.
The Jim Doyle & Associates Blog: In the interest of full disclosure, let me point out that my day job is as a consultant and sales trainer for Jim Doyle & Associates. But I was a paying customer of this company before they hired me – when I was a radio account executive, I paid out of my pocket to be part of Jim’s sales coaching program. Jim himself wrote Don’t Just Make A Sale… Make A Difference: How Top Achievers Approach Advertising Sales. He, Tom Ray, Pat Norris and John Hannon all provide content to the blog. If you sell radio, television, print, online, billboards, or any other media, this stuff works.
Monday Morning Memo Every Monday, Roy Williams (the Wizard of Ads, not the basketball coach) pontificates about advertising, marketing, persuasion, and anything else that he wants the world to know. Sometimes, he wants the world to know how smart he is, so his blog does occasionally go off in the weeds. But more often than not, he has excellent advice on how to enter somebody’s mind and convince them to do or think something. His book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads: Turning Paupers into Princes and Lead into Gold is required reading for anyone who works in advertising, or wants to.
Sam Richter’s Know More Blog Richter is the author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, a terrific book on how to research prospects online. He offers a variety resources, some for free and some for money. He is a blog tackles a variety of topics, from sales techniques to to search for information to the value of social media.

[reminder]What’s your favorite advertising, marketing, or sales blog?[/reminder]