Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Direct Marketers just don't get Search Marketing

In keeping with my habit of posting once a year, I finally have something to say again...
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So, I had high hopes for the DMA 2006 because they had all kinds of lip service to interactive and search marketing and such forth. They had a whole Expo hall of interactive technologies and vendors. They had sessions galore on convergence, search, email, and more. I was lulled momentarily into believing that the icons of DM were truly grasping the cross-channel possibilities.

Then I started checking out the follow-through on the campaigns that won ECHO Awards.

Top slot: The Diamond ECHO award went to OgilvyOne for their Friskies "milkaholic" campaign. Sounded cool - Here's how it's described on the DMA site:

"Friskies, once the leader in the dry cat food category, had been steadily loosing market share. A new product innovation, Milk Essentials, was developed that combined the taste of milk that cats love without the lactose that can give them digestive problems. OgilvyOne designed a campaign to shine a light on feline lactose-intolerance and offer Friskies with Milk Essentials as the solution in a unique, hard-hitting way that reflected this fun and spirited brand. By creating a fictional “holism” – feline milkaholism – a humorous platform was established for a successful and memorable campaign roll-out."

Great! Let's see what they did online to support it.

Search "milkaholic" on Google. Nada on the paid or organic listings. Just baby things, a WordSpy page that had nothing to do with Friskies, and random crap from Yahoo:


So why was this the top winner? I don't have a clue. I should probably have attended the awards ceremony and then maybe I'd see how truly innovative it was. Secretly I think it's just cuz cute animal campaigns always win (usually involving monkeys).

I also tried [milkaholic Friskies] and [milkaholic campaign] and couldn't find a shred of info.
Hm. Well, maybe they had something up there while the campaign was running, right? And they forgot that online there is no end to campaigns. Campaigns run around and return occasionally into public memory, so you always need to have some sort of web presence to tie it back. Derivative recall possibilities, you know.

Let's try another. This time, a UK promotion for a product called "Flash" for cleaning. They had a contest and a direct mail promo called "Flash Hunk" where they invented a sort of Brawny guy virtual hottie:

"
Flash Hunk, a cheeky Chippendale cleaning man dressed only in an apron and boxer shorts who demonstrated how easily the Flash Brand products can be used – even by a man. Users were given control of the cleaning man, using flash and video clips. They could type in the word for what they wanted cleaned, and then sit back and enjoy watching the Flash Hunk get to work. It’s not easy to excite women about cleaning, but making the brand engaging while providing product information generated significant traffic as well as positive word of mouth."

Let's journey to Google.co.uk and see what they have running:

Ok, so at least we're seeing things in the organic listings that have to do with the campaign. A little rooting around (down to the third link) finally gets us to this site with the campaign still running:



Very cute. Unfortunately, they had it hosted at an IP address instead of a domain (
217.169.41.147/flashhunk) but what the heck. I had a good time playing with the dude in his underwear. He doesn't clean house very well though. Typical.




Final score: one up, one down. I'd have rather them give the top award to the Yahoo!/Apprentice "Solstice" campaign, which won the A. Eicoff award but was a really excellent cross-channel campaign. I'm betting it cost less than the Friskies campaign and probably sold more total dollar volume of merchandise. It helped sell 1000 vehicles in the first 41 minutes of them being available! Calculated out at approximately $10k per car to the mfr, that's $10,000,000. Not a bad return. Hella more interesting to me than some freakin' cat food.

Maybe they should have put some kittens in the campaign.