Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓

The latest in viral web marketing takes center stage this week as a new aspect of hype is thrust upon us in the days leading up to the Super Bowl. The latest viral effort? ‘Banned’ TV commercials for the upcoming big game that ABC declined to air that are currently making their way around the net. Some of these ads would appear legit while others were clearly never intended for the Super Bowl. No matter, for the cost of the video production your company can get broadcast around the Internet for free by people like you and I as we watch these TV commercials and then send them to colleagues, friends and family. I was interested to see this one for the online recruitment site QuietAgent.com and wanted to include it here so you too could catch something viral… !vb:gv,8831146159637456815,3!

WB NETWORK’S PR GUY SUMS UP IMPACT OF VIDEO TECHNOLOGY ON T.V. RATHER WELL: …Speaking at the NATPE convention in Las Vegas, Keith Marder, publicity man for the WB Network was quoted as saying:

“Technology continues to change our industry. Thanks to innovations, you can now watch television on your iPod, your PC, and your cell phone. Good luck. We can’t even get people to watch television on television sets.”

Employer Branding | Authenticity Brought to Life.

“Holy S%#t that’s a lot of stuff!”

So, ends a quote in a new candidate focused 20-page glossy magazine about to publish at Allianz Life - that’s Ahh..Lee..Ahnz Life. A little edgier than you’d expect from one of the largest financial services companies and insurer of health maintenance organizations isn’t it? But, as you’ll learn, Allianz is clearly NO stodgy insurance company.

Recent EXCELER8ion posts have focused on the importance of authenticity in Employer Branding. Our expertise and blog focus is on interactive marketing - but Jason Buss, Director, Talent and Business services at Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America gave us of a sneak preview at a new magazine called Confessions. It was so good and relevant to our recent topics that we wanted to feature it here on EXCELER8ion.

Confessions is still in the making by the Allianz Life^® marketing department - yes, that’s right, HR and Marketing play nice at Allianz and corporate marketing develops the recruitment marketing communications. Jason tells us that the final product will be a 15-20 page, high-gloss magazine, complete with bar codes and address labels for each Allianz Life^® job candidate.

Allianz Life^® gets that delivering an exceptional and authentic candidate experience is crucial to the development of their employer brand. With Confessions, Allianz is turning the candidate experience up a notch by offering candidates a true, no-holds-barred, glimpse inside the company. Their promise is that the secrets at Allianz will be revealed and candidates will have a complete view of the company’s culture and values.

To be fair - there are some more traditional topics covered in Confessions, such as Allianz’s commitment to its employee development, diversity and charity; but the publication remains true to its edgy theme with real employee quotes complete with profanity and admissions that the money is not that great. The authors even apologize to the reader saying that if you don’t like what they have to say that they are sorry for wasting your valuable time.

Buss said that the stories in Confessions honestly made him a little nervous at first. I mean, holy s%#t - they’re an insurance and annuities company!
More corporations and managers need to be willing to display this kind of courage and willingness to provide potential candidates with a true and accurate look into the company culture. The result will be a stronger, authentic employer brand. It almost goes without saying that Allianz will improve both their recruiting and employee retention results because of their vision.

Right on Ahh-Lee-Ahnz!

Feel free to us know of some other examples of cutting-edge employer branding you’ve seen out there.

A post by Julian and Shannon

It really pains me to see our old company, Knight Ridder Digital, up for sale (Shannon and I are both KRD alumni, and it’s actually where we met). Everyone knows that current Knight Ridder shareholders are looking for bigger profits and valuation from the looming sale. They’ll get some of that but only if they recognize what they really have and invest in it. I’ve been surprised that none of the press has talked about other companies that could stand to benefit from buying Knight Ridder other than the (yawn) other newspaper companies and private equity firms (cringe) that have been named as likely suitors. I know there are good arguments as to why other companies aren’t being discussed, especially interactive companies like Yahoo! or Google, but I think that’s all wrong. Yes, print is going down hill - no kidding - but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the product, it is great local content after all, and even though the Google’s and Yahoo!’s of the world are more about dismantling old models like the one KR operates under it doesn’t have to be that way. If I’ve learned anything from ten years in the Yellow Pages industry and another five at a local newspaper shop, it’s that there’s no better place to find high margin money than local. Local news and information, be it print or online requires investment and the best management to make it work. You keep managing a mature product as a dead product and you create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and all your best people leave.

From the sounds of it you’d think I was an old company stalwart. Actually, I love technology and new companies but I’ve worked for old line, mature product companies for much of my career. I worked for Pacific Bell Directory (SMART Yellow Pages) in the Bay Area for 10 years in the 90’s and played a role in the “Merger integration” work for the entire sales division for Pacific Bell Directory when SBC (now AT&T) purchased Pacific Telesis. I was one of two representatives from sales leadership who flew out to the St. Louis headquarters of SBC’s Yellow Pages and got a front row seat to the efficiencies planning, ‘best practices’ work and new management and employee structures that would become the new company. It wasn’t pretty.

Tony Ridder understood the impact of the Internet back in the mid-90’s much better than most as the Chicago Tribune points out quite accurately, and he backed his vision with real investment dollars until the ‘Dot Com Bomb’ of late 2000 started to detonate. From then on until about a 18 months ago I would say that Knight Ridder has managed their growth Internet properties like a mature product with very little investment and an almost unseen amount of innovation. Why? Investors and Wall Street. Could Tony Ridder, the KR board and senior management have done better? Yes.

I used to delight in telling my new employees that Knight Ridder was the first company in the world to publish a newspaper online (MercuryCenter on AOL) but it was a hollow statement in more recent years as I took part in laying off staff that we desperately needed in an industry with a REAL hockey stick growth rate! Stop and think about that. Why would a company with major assets in one of the hottest industries be cutting staff? As far as management practices go this one is a non-starter. It’s not like people thought during the time of the dot com bomb that the Internet was going to go away or stop producing results. This gutlessness is the root cause of Knight Ridder’s woes.

From the company legacy and employee perspective there is very little good that comes from being acquired. On the flip side the purchasing company will have many upsides, including a plethora of new job opportunities in middle and senior management and a very real power boost from owning new brands, expertise and products. But, I think the truth of the matter is that it’s not that much fun for anyone but the stockholders. Even then there is certainly no guarantee. Knight Ridder is a good company, no doubt under performing on Wall street but I believe it is just our investor Attention Deficit Disorder and management vision that make it so.

When SBC purchased PacBell there was almost a wholesale change of management, key employees and business practices despite the fact that there were many really bright people at PacBell and some great ways of doing business. This is how it goes with buyouts. SBC threw the baby out with the bath water. A year later SBC purchased the tiny SNET of Connecticut but their leadership at least saved some vestiges of management respect when they went down. They certainly outdid the far larger and mighty PacBell, proving that with buyouts that vision and chutzpah are more important than revenue and profit margins.
I hope that Tony Ridder has the guts to stand up for his company. He’s representing generations of Ridder’s, Knight’s and countless thousands of people who have brought great news and advertising to the U.S. and even the world. I hope that the resulting company will respect what they have and invest in it - that it won’t just be an efficiencies race like we all know is the likely outcome. I’ll be rooting for Mr. Ridder, his board and his senior managers like Hilary Schneider, and all the great friends I have there to pull off the all-but-impossible.

The Yahoo! and Google equation that no one is writing about - Maybe that’s because my following hypothesis is all wet but hear me out.

I say that Google or Yahoo! should buy Knight Ridder and would greatly benefit from the purchase. New world companies like Google and Yahoo! have more need for KR’s content and more respect for their success in journalism, advertising and classifieds than any of the other newspaper companies said to be looking at KR. Never mind the news content, what about the hugely successful world of online recruitment where Knight Ridder is 1/3 owner of CareerBuilder.com? Knight Ridder’s online recruitment revenue’s are about 40% of their total online revenue and it only keeps growing. If Yahoo!, currently third in the online recruitment space to CareerBuilder’s second, purchased Knight Ridder they would become a Monster.com squashing powerhouse. Yeah, Tribune and Gannett, the other owners of CareerBuilder would have to agree to the sale but I think they could find it in their hearts to get in bed with Yahoo!, especially if Yahoo! extended some of their other offerings to them. I don’t think it hurts that the CEO of HotJobs, Dan Finnigan, used to run Knight Ridder Digital and was a chief architect of the CareerBuilder acquisition. After working for Dan at both Knight Ridder Digital and before that, SBC’s SMARTpages.com I saw first hand what a great biz dev talent he is and I can’t believe Dan’s not thinking about these things and talking them over with Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo!. Yahoo! could also combine efforts with Knight Ridder in the hot local search space, a huge oil well waiting to gush the online equivalent of black gold by using the local advertiser relationships that Knight Ridder has. Did I mention that Dan brought over Knight Ridder Digital’s VP of Sales, Tim Lambert to run biz dev at HotJobs? I know Tim well from working for him for years and he’s now moved on to head up Yahoo!’s local sales effort (local search) and is using the experience he gained at Pacific Bell Yellow Pages and Knight Ridder Digital to make Yahoo!’s local search effort a real success.

What I would say against my hypothesis is the obvious oil and vinegar business model that these old/new model companies have. Yahoo! also has a lot of broadcast depth and focus in their senior management and their content clearly leans that way so I could understand if they’re not as excited about print content, as they would be to acquire, say, CNN broadcast content. But, it could still play.

Google also stands to win in this same scenario where they could gain Knight Ridder’s content but also establish themselves overnight in online recruitment, a space that they are clearly starting to go after while also substantially furthering their local search efforts. In fact I believe that a Yahoo!/Google like solution is the ONLY one that will help KR grow and become even more than they already are. Alas, the newspaper companies that would buy KR would only interject more of the same thinking that put Knight Ridder where they are to begin with and a purchase from private equity firms will be the beginning of the end of a great company. Please don’t do it Mr. Ridder - no matter what pressure you come under - let your last at bat be the one you hit out of the park for your brothers and your mom, your dad, your legacy and for all your employees that are counting on you. Believe me, as former employees and as people who have both enjoyed representing your products AND using them please know that we are cheering you on!!

Oh, and if you and your brothers start another news company with all the money you make from the sale and eventually go public, make sure you have two classes of stock.

Good luck

This is a great overview of Buzz Marketing that does a really good job of defining what kind of products BuzzM works best for and what trends may develop if the marketing tactic is overused as we fear it is predestined to be.

Business Week on Buzz Marketing

Here’s a list BW published on the rules of Buzz:

Want to get the world talking about your product? Here’s how to get started:

FOLLOW THE LEADERS
You only need to reach a handful of consumers–as long as they’re the right handful. Identify true trendsetters and let them spread your message for you.

CREATE SCARCITY
Lure those key consumers with coveted items–whether hot news, loaner cars, or cool gadgets–that are in short supply, and let the buzz begin.

BE AUTHENTIC
Although a buzz campaign may have fictional elements, the premise should be true to the brand. What works for a Lucky Strike could be wrong for a Marlboro.

OR BE BLATANTLY INAUTHENTIC
This approach can work as long as consumers don’t feel duped. Humor helps, too. Think of it as Joe Isuzu with buzz.

PREPARE FOR THE UNKNOWN
Buzz-building is an intangible, unpredictable process, aimed at a slippery target. If you can’t go with the flow, buy a TV ad.