McDonald's Ad:Food Photos Never What You Get

The most elaborate photo shoot I've been involved in to date was for a popular candy bar. By the time I got to the shoot, the crew had been working for several hours under the direction of an acclaimed food photographer and our art director. On a table were two foot-long candy bar models that had been carefully fabricated out of plastic to make sure they matched the "hero" (or hand-made to be perfect) candy bars we had been provided by the manufacturer. In the case of this product, the "decoration" or wavy pattern on the top had a specific design and the chocolate was without blemishes (like the air holes that occur during the normal manufacturing process). There were two assistants in waders, knee deep in a vat of chocolate. A complex rig had been developed that would create waves in the vat and another rig was designed to bring the two halves of the chocolate bar out of the vat in a smooth motion. On the counter, were several hand-manufactured candy bars and two food stylists were working with paint brushes and various jars containing liquids artfully creating smooth delectable-looking chocolate. Nine hours later, we had a signature ending that would last a fraction under 5 seconds to end our TV commercials. McDonald's of Canada has put a YouTube video up showing how they prepare a Quarter Pounder with Cheese sandwich for a photo shoot and I must admit I was surprised at how little they do. How does what they do compare to what is done in the industry to make the food you buy appeal to you in advertisements? In the YouTube video, Hope Begozzi, the Director of Marketing for McDonalds Canada first goes to a local McDonald's and orders a burger. She takes it out of the package to show the camera, reboxes it and takes it to their commercial photographer. He places the store-bought burger on a table top in front of the camera and photographs it. We then see a food stylist style a burger which is placed next to the first burger. There is a marked difference in the styled burger. The mustard and catsup are put into place with a syringe. The onions and pickles are all hand placed. The resulting product looks magnificent. And every ingredient used in the shoot was an actually item used in the store. Over the course of my career I have seen acrylic ice cubes, Karo syrup used for the sweat on beer bottles, liquids like motor oil and cranberry juice to make liquids look more appealing, tooth picks, super glue, wood stain and shoe polish. And throughout my career, every piece of meat has been undercooked (nearly raw actually) to make it appear juicy and succulent. The average McDonalds employee makes under $8 an hour. The average food stylist takes home up to $150 per hour. It takes, at minimum, an art director, food stylist, prop stylist and a retoucher to make food look like you want to eat it. I went across the street at lunchtime to watch a large crowd eat at McDonald's. I didn't see anyone that looked like a food critic there. Just a large, diverse crowd trying to stay cool and get their grub on. A couple of years ago, Domino's Pizza became the first large food franchise to announce it would no longer retouch its food photography in an attempt to keep its pledge to be honest and transparent to its customers. As the internet and social media force more industry secrets out into the open here's hoping more companies will follow suit even though you might find that when it comes to food a little fantasy and presentation may be in order.

There’s an Ad Agency on Mobaso Road in Nairobi

Do Ad Networks Practice Double Standard When It Comes To African American Consumers? Those of you who know me, know that I’m a research nut. I like to find information and I’ll go to great lengths to get at interesting facts. This inquisitiveness has served me well over the span of my career. Information is power, it helps you prove points. It helps shine a light on inequities. I like to think ultimately, information leads to truth and truth has interesting qualities. William Cullen Bryant said that “Truth crushed to the earth will rise again”. So, follow along as I tell you what I just found out. It all started with an article I saw yesterday that talked about Omnicom’s TBWA setting up shop in Nairobi to compete in the fast growing Kenyan advertising market, which according to sources grew 30% last year. 30% is nothing to sneeze at and their clients GSK, Visa and Unilever among others are all blue top shelf clients. I started snooping around to find out more about the Kenyan market. There are a lot of international agencies there from the US, Asia and The UK. McCann and Ogilvy are there as are Porter Novelli and Y&R. (Y&R is the agency I refer to in the title –they are in Panesar’s Centre on Mobaso Road). The firms there handle many international clients like Toyota and Coca Cola as well as local clients like Telkom Kenya and Jamii, a broadband provider. The Gross Nation Income of Kenya is $68 Billion. Its population is 40 Million people. By contrast the calculated GNI of African Americans who are about 39 Million people is 803 Billion and the median household income is $35,425 compared to $2,000 per year for the average Kenyan family. What is my point? Simply that Advertising agencies and their holding companies go to the far reaches of the globe and do hand-to-hand combat for market share in one of the poorest countries in the world. Kenya currently ranks 180th out of 210 countries yet go out of their way to justify why they will not target the African American market and use the proven market experts to do it. I call on clients that know they derive a significant share of their business from the African American market (If you don’t know call me and I’ll run a quick GfK MRI analysis on your brand and help you out) to get with the program, do what’s right and spend your marketing dollars with the advertising agencies, media companies, newspapers, radio stations and consumers from whom you derive significant profit.

Worldwide Charity Uses Tech To Target. Women, Girls.

Facial recognition software being used in UK campaign to determine gender of viewer.

Now this is interesting! A worldwide charity called Plan, which focuses on helping millions of underprivileged children in over 50 developing nations, has launched an innovative ad campaign in the UK. The transit campaign called Because I Am A Girl uses facial recognition software to determine the gender of the person standing in front of it. If the scan determines the viewer is female, a 40-second ad plays that features three young teenage girls each from a different country. Men and boys are not shown the ads but are directed to information allowing them to give so that girls can have choices.
The powerful ads informs the viewer that as many as 75 million girls are denied the right to education or forced into marriages where many have children while still being children themselves. The point of the ads is to educate as well as to actually demonstrate how girls in many countries are denied access.
The ads have a computer, a touch screen and a hi-definition camera. The software scans a face and then uses algorithm that compares facial features to a standard using distance between the eyes, width of nose, length of the jaw line and shape of cheekbones. It has tested about 90% accurate.
This isn’t the first time facial recognition has been used in a campaign, but here it is being used in a very unique manner. Selecting gender in this case, is part of the creative strategy and reinforces the message. As planners, our goal is always to have the creative drive home the insight. This campaign has the potential to do just that.
The campaign also uses digital, social media and PR. The plan has been around as a charity since 1937. The campaign is running everywhere on the web, but only in Canada and the UK does it go beyond the web and so far only in London does it use the facial recognition ad described here. The interactive display was created by Clear Channel with the help of 3D Exposure and Curb Media.
I believe it is just a matter of time before we start seeing more innovative technology collaborations hit the US market.

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The Next Big Thing? Adaptive Marketing

Marketers working hard to market using data captured though sales and social media.

This week KLM Dutch Airlines thrust Adaptive Marketing into the headlines with its announcement that it was working on a program to allow customers to use social media like Facebook to choose who they would like to sit with on a flight. It's an interesting concept and actually not that difficult to implement. Many travelers already use the internet to purchase their tickets and choose their seats. Airlines have been working hard to increase their presence in social media and millions of travelers use Facebook or Linked-in. KLM found in their research that a large group of travelers like to flirt on flights. This leads them to believe that facilitating social interaction on flights might be good for business. Or not. Most flights these days are full and once in the air, the likelihood of changes seats is low. Airlines are not equipped to handle multiple passenger request to move seats. Unless both passengers agree, there might be some sticky legal issues involved with taking the randomness out of seat assignments. While the idea of connecting travelers through social media might not fly, it is clear that marketers are looking for and will increasingly find ways to make use of technology and the great wealth of data that can be culled, compared and matched to give them the ability to connect to consumers in new ways. This is Adaptive Marketing: enhancing traditional marketing with information gained through technology. It is in its infancy, but it is everywhere. Amazon uses it to suggest books based on what you purchase and look at while on their site. Domino's Pizza allows you to virtually follow your pizza being made and track it to your house. Coke is testing vending machines that allow you to customize the combination of flavors you want to drink. But it's deeper than all of this. We have presented a concept to General Motors to help them utilize the data they already have. Imagine going on vacation and renting a car. When you credit card is swiped, you have effectively provided preliminary credit information a well as your address. after driving the car on your vacation which amounts to a test drive, you return the car. We've suggested a perforated section at the bottom of your receipt that would list a few local dealers as well as a coupon for a pre-determined rebate on the car model, if purchased within the next 90 days. We've also counseled a few professional sports teams on how to look at their entire, nationwide fan base, not just those in their immediate area. Imagine marketing apparel not just to the million fans that come to your stadium but to the 25 million fans that follow you across the country. Adaptive marketing involves collecting, organizing and mining the data as well as extending advertising and marketing messages into building communities using social media and gleaned information about customers. It also involves listening very carefully as the consumers talks about you when you're not in the room. We call that "pillow talk" and have developed an ethnograhic research tool of the same name.
We're entering into a brave new world where soon advertisers will know way too much about us and have way too many avenues for reaching us even when we are in places we consider off-limits to commercial messages. Marketers who crack the code on how to get information and use it to give customers what they want when they want it will gain exponentially. Marketers who use the data to find you with heavy-handed and intrusive messages when and where you don't want them will be penalized by the loss of sales and customer goodwill.

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Super Bowl Ad Spending Tops $230 Million

Was Super Bowl Ad Spending An Economic Indicator?

The Super Bowl was more intense than usual. And not just for the hard fought close game or the nail-biting ending watching as New England quarterback Brady heaved a Hail Mary pass into the end zone. It was the first time I tried watching the game and engaging in social media at the same time. I tweeted throughout, visited cokepolarbear.com to watch the bears watch the game and even dropped in on Facebook to see what my friends and family were doing. The online chatter was mostly about the advertising. Perceived winners and losers. The majority of people in my social network found an ad or two to love, but the overall sentiment was that advertisers may have been trying to hard and that many of the spots missed the mark. I watched the ads carefully and generally agree but my takeaway is broader than that. Advertisers spent an estimated $230 million for the airtime alone.Many advertisers that would not have touched a $1 million dollar spot a few years ago were literally rolling around in $3 million dollar spots. Hyundai purchased five, General Motors, on welfare a couple of years ago had five spots in the big game as well. In fact, about 30% of the spots shown during the game were for automobile manufacturers. They didn't just show up. They showed up with celebrities, stunts, animals and intricate social media tie-ins. While the economy might not be back, big business seems to be spending again. Let's hope that hiring isn't far behind.

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Super Bowl Advertisers Heavy Up on the Social Media

Marketers plan to tee up consumers with spots, then hit them with social media engagement.

I was at a panel discussion a couple of years ago with David Plouffe, campaign manager for President Obama’s 2008 campaign. David said one of the revelations they had during the campaign was that if it wasn’t on video, it didn’t happen. In a similar vein, social media works best when, well, when there is something to be social about and very few things are as social as sports. In fact, 4 of the top ten most tweeted moments have been sports moments and every one of those four beat tweets of Osama Bin Laden’s death and all but one beat the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami. It should come as no surprise then that the Super Bowl represents for advertisers, not just millions of eyeballs watching the broadcast but also millions of fingers simultaneously sharing their thoughts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. As Social Media matures, advertisers are become savvier in their ability to use it as part of the overall media mix. This year, the Super Bowl gives us a good look at current practices using a combination of traditional and digital media. During this year’s Super Bowl, advertisers will be anticipating that viewers will access the internet while watching the game.
The Super Bowl routinely draws more than 100 million viewers and is the biggest single event stage for advertisers. All seventy spots sold this year going for as much as $4 million for a single commercial. According to the Coca Cola marketing team, at least 60% of Super Bowl viewers are expected to have another screen—smartphone, tablet or laptop—nearby. So naturally, Coke will be planning to engage viewers online. Coke’s TV spots will be directing viewers to CokePolarBear.com, where a couple of the Coke Polar Bears will be watching the Super Bowl each rooting for a different team. Reportedly they will be cheering enthusiastically and also watching the commercials. Should be fun when a Pepsi ad comes on! Visitors to the site will also be able to ask the bears questions. Finally, after the game, visitors will be able to send friends coupons for coke either celebratory or conciliatory depending on your team preference.
GM’s Chevrolet is also motoring grill first into the fray with the Chevy Game Time app. Using the headline: “Don’t Just Watch, Play Along With the Super Bowl” the free app download will allow users to interact socially with trivia questions and polls during the game along with the chance to win 1 of 20 cars and thousands of other prizes being given away. Users can also share the content with people in their social network. In a clever twist, if you registered before January 27th, you were given a unique license plate number. See that plate number on a car in the spot and that means you’ve won it.
Most, if not all of the 35 or so advertisers in this year’s Super Bowl will be trying to send viewers to websites to further engage them. They will be competing with Super Bowl advertisers, advertisers who will be trying to grab viewers from the many who will be online and pretty much everybody else. The power of social media is that it puts the power into the hands of whoever can wrest attention. The Super Bowl itself, for the first time, is setting up a Super Bowl Command Center. A team of social media strategists and technical experts will situate themselves in a 2,800 square foot facility and monitor the conversation on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms to interact with the expected 150,000 people who will be in Indianapolis for the game. They will help them find parking, perform other helpful tasks and be on hand in the case of an emergency. As of this writing there are more than 21,000 people already following the command center on Twitter.
It has become clear that the internet can be a very useful marketing tool for advertisers. The trick is to find the right level of engagement for the brand. Consumers, who utilize the second screen generally, are enjoying discussing the event with their chosen network of family, friends and associates and eavesdropping on what others are saying including the rich and famous. The brand that tries to get to intrusive or familiar runs the risk of actually alienating the consumer or worse angering a consumer who can then aim his weapon—his influence—at the brand. In this day and age an influential consumer with an axe to grind can do some damage. I hope that with all of the online excitement, we don’t miss the game!

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