whizdumb

The deprivation strategy

With Whopper Freakout upon us I was thinking about its deprivation approach in contrast to the classic Got Milk campaign.

Jon Steel used deprivation as a tool to generate research conversation around a category that was taken for granted.   As we learned in Truth, Lies and Advertising the exploratory research at the front end of the campaign was the inspiration.

We imagine the research groups ablaze with stories of milkless woe, each respondent outdoing the other in their misery. 

A strategy was born. The creatives went with it and the rest is history - a history filled largely with big television ads in all their witty, brilliant and decadent glory.

I say decadent because when you compare them with CP+B's version of a deprivation strategy a few things emerge. 

Whopper Freakout is based on the same insight: you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.  But where Got Milk was all about wrapping this in creative vignettes The Freakout is low budget, big idea.  It's human to the core.  We are at once identifying with, and laughing at, the people at the counter demanding their favorite sandwich. It doesn't require the imagined reality of fantasy scenarios or take us down a long narrative path.  It doesn't try to be a mini-movie; it's all documentary.

Back in the day Goodby could have hidden cameras somewhere to show people's behavior when denied milk (would have been much harder to do). But the context was different then and it would have been just weird.  But now we're so used to seeing people on videos it's second nature. 

Watching these two spots (is Freakout a spot? What should I call it, a video?) makes the Milk one seem so, well, it seems like such a commercial.  Brilliant, yes.  But it just seems like such an end to itself. A campaign only as good as its latest execution.  It takes you to creative imaginaryland.  But I watch Freakout and I just want to go down to BK and see (eat) what all the fuss is about.

And when I look at these two it seems to show how things are moving more towards a Google-like model of anticipate / act / adjust, rather than the long drawn out bowtie of research / insight / creative development. 

Milk: Deprivation is the brief, brought to life creatively.
BK: Deprivation is the idea, period.

The path from good thinking to idea seems to keep getting shorter. 

The Good Food Fight

Here's a little quiz.  Would you rather:

1) Read about the benefits of a healthy diet

2) Be exposed to the startling statistics about obesity in America

3) Hear General Mills talk about how great its products are

4) Have a food fight

It's a wonderful thing when marketers take their products off a pedestal and encourage you to throw them.  Which is exactly what you do at The Good Food Fight.

Of course eating right is a serious thing.  Obesity is nothing to laugh at (Except for fat jokes.  Those can be pretty damn funny.)  But we've been lectured to about this stuff for a long time.  What is so smart about this campaign by General Mills is that they realized that people are tired of the hard sell, the meaningless and increasingly confusing claims of increased healthiness, trans fats and the like. 

Compare this with Pepsi's Smart Spot program, which takes a more predictable hard sell approach.

At least General Mills gives us some credit that our world does not revolve around their brands, but rather, we need a reason to care.  And they trust that a fun experience will get your attention enough to consider taking a look at their Eat Better America website.

Once you get there you find a surprisingly readable and deep resource for diet, exercise, recipes, articles, and of course, subtle mentions and coupons for General Mills products.  I tend to have a very sensitive BS detector for sponsored content but this passes muster because of the transparency of the brands and the depth of the content. 

And the food fight.  You gotta love throwing spaghetti at a taunting cafeteria lady.

Starbucks CEO interview

(Ignore the Bush image, the Howard Schultz segment is after Bush.)

Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, was on Charlie Rose recently. I've never really heard him talk before so it was interesting to hear about how the company started and what his personal background (Brooklyn, projects) and priorities are (universal health care).

To be honest, I really don't like Starbucks. I am put off by its ubiquity and I don't connect with the iconic white cardboard cup the way a lot of people do. I just don't find it stands for much except a sort of blind masstige conformity.

As a marketer though, I respect what they've done; namely, to cultivate a fiercely loyal brand following in the absence of advertising. So I was interested to hear Schultz talk about his approach to the company and its role in culture. Here are some highlights:

- Starbucks spends more on health care insurance than they do on coffee. Each employee who works more than 20 hrs/week gets access to the company health care plan and stock options.

- "We're not in the coffee business serving people, but in the people business serving coffee."

- "There is no single patent that we have. There is no secret sauce. We buy the world's best coffee, roast it to perfection . . . but the only competitive advantage we have is the relationship we have with our people, our employees. You can't exceed the expectations of your customer unless you first exceed the expectations of your people. That's the only advantage we have, every single day."

- "We live at a time right now where we long for human connection. The world is very fragile; we work hundreds of hours [a year] more than our parent's generation, technology has become a burden not just a tool, it's very secular - our existence - and the human connection, conversation, the sense of humanity, sense of community that exists in Starbucks has proven to be a real asset to the company and probably not since the English pub has something been created . . . Starbcucks has become this third place between home and work. We have become, clearly, this third place. It is as relevant - or more relevant - as a third place outside the US."

- In America 80% of the business is takeout. In China, where they have about 500 stores, it's nearly the opposite. People linger for hours, go on dates there. Their challenge in China is to become enduring, not faddish.

- The wi-fi in their stores makes up the largest wi-fi footprint in the world

- He is seeing his stores as an entertainment network. More than 40 million people went into starbucks this week, which is twice as many as the largest network TV show audience

- Sees the brand as a distribution mechanism for entertainment content. "Starbucks can play a major role in the distribution of unique documentaries."

- "Great companies push for innovation. They compete with themselves and that's what we have to keep doing."

White as Milk

According to coloribus this is from AMA Leo Burnett in Egypt.  It's strange... is it a gurerilla execution?  A print ad (if so, what the hell is up with the production value)?  It seems spec or a guerilla one-off.  What is admirable about it is its simplicity and complete lack of gaudy claims. 

I scream for ice cream

I was in Washington, DC recently and passed through the Air and Space Museum food court for a quick lunch. I started chatting with this guy sitting next to me and he told me his story. He was in town for the summer on an assignment with Dreyer's Ice Cream company. The company has a facility in the DC area and was getting a Häagen-Dazs production line up and running (both Dreyer's and Häagen-Dazs are owned by Nestlé). He was a an engineer who programs and manages the giant churning machines. Basically he is the Wizard behind the curtain at the ice cream factory. He asked where we were from and when we said Denver, he cringed a bit. "It's tough to get good ice cream into Denver." Because of the altitude there is a lot of "out-gassing," he said. The air in the ice cream, which helps to make it light and creamy, expands at altitude and escapes the product. It results in ice cream that is flat, like if you thawed and re-froze it. I personally haven't really seen this in my ice cream but I'm going to look now. I will not tolerate out-gassing in my ice cream!

He described how the new Häagen-Dazs line began by producing pure ice cream, before any flavors were added. There is some sort of spigot at the end of the line where he tastes the final product. He said it was absolutely divine, and he thought this 'plain' flavor was ice cream at its most elemental, simple and pure.

Above is a picture of Häagen-Dazs' new flavor, Sticky Toffee Pudding. One could argue that this whole flavor business has gone too far. Way too far. What began with cookie dough has metastasized into Sticky Toffee Pudding? Maybe someday soon there will be a backlash. Back, way back to the origins, to the proverbial teet of that spigot in the Häagen-Dazs factory. Nothing but cream, sugar, and of course, milk.

Sorry. Couldn't help it.

Viva Famima!!

A successful Japanese chain of convenience stores has just opened four stores in the US, all of them in West L.A. I visited the one on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It’s quite a cool concept. The store is the size of a small 7-Eleven but with a much more mellow feel. There is not a lot of aggressive display activity and there is an amazing range of products, all high end. These range from paper towels (actual there was only one brand of paper towels, Seventh Generation) to Japanese candles and pottery, to sandwiches, soups and stationery. One of my favorites was a small tin of "Little i" mints with a cosmetic mirror built in.

There were a lot of green products such as Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, and I was struck by the beverage selections – no cans except for Red Bull, and tons of exotic teas, Jones and Izzie sodas, lots of juices, etc. There was a small row of Coke and Pepsi products in the bottom row of the cooler but they actually looked really out of place. About a quarter to a third of all the products were Japanese. Instead of hot dogs and taquitos in the hot cases, they served sticky buns and fried bread.

Their website is surprisingly transparent about their marketing strategy. They talk about how their targeting of young upscale women, including Japanese people living in America. They compare how a traditional convenience store layout is controlled by the manufacturer, but in their concept, the layout is determined by shopping ease, and “an alternative for the intelligent, concerned, or curious … with the primary objective of improving the well being of the customer.” That's some pretty fancy talk compared to what you'd expect from folks running the 'sev on the corner. Quick-E-Marts of America, beware.