|
BY ANTHONY CRUPI
In his feisty jeremiad Your Marketing Sucks, entrepreneur Mark Stevens comes to a surprising conclusion about the relative efficacy of using sex to market a product. Among the contemporary campaigns that earn Stevens's derision is Miller's ?Catfight? series, wherein a pair of scantily dressed women settle the ?great taste/less filling? debate with a spirited round of mud wrestling.
Stevens concludes that the spots, while inarguably popular among the coveted 18-to-34-year-old male demographic, didn't account for an appreciable uptick in beer sales. ?What they really did was drive guys into the bedroom and not into the supermarket, where the beer is sold,? he writes.
While there's no way to accurately assess the validity of Stevens's conclusions, the man certainly knows a thing or two about marketing his own product, if sales of the book are anything to go by. Last week, Your Marketing Sucks was ranked 321 on Amazon.com's sales chart. Perhaps it's time for providers of high-speed Internet service to give Stevens's tome a quick read-through.
Thus far, the most scrutinized campaign for HSD service has been America Online's $35 million ?World Wide Wow? salvo, which bowed in January of this year. Essentially an introduction to the joys of broadband, the linchpin of the campaign features the actress Sharon Stone in what appears to be post-coital bliss.
?That was the most amazing experience I ever had,? Stone gasps. ?So?can you stay? Or do you have to run?? At which point, the camera cuts to AOL's animated Running Man logo, which in classic rogue fashion, makes a break for the door, leaving the fading screen siren alone with her memories of, um, having sex with an important part of AOL's branding strategy.
?Icons,? she sighs in exasperation. ?Gak,? we respond, barking our shins against the coffee table in our haste to reach the remote. No wonder things didn't work out with Phil Bronstein.
And we're not the only ones who found the whole thing entirely too unsettling to sit through. According to recent Ad Track data, 26% of viewers surveyed said they disliked the Stone spot, more than twice the average. Whether the negative reaction has something to do with the ad's racy subtext ? there is an awful lot of panting/heavy breathing going on here ? or if it's a matter of not being able to discern what AOL is actually shilling, the statistic suggests that the ISP needs to take a long, hard look at its marketing strategy.
AOL's biggest mistake is falling back on the old ?sex sells? chestnut that Stevens so avidly decries. Not only does it clash with the company's core vision ? AOL is forever touting its parental controls and blocking software in its dial-up product ? but it also flags the broadband product as something the kids might be better off without. Beyond all that, it simply isn't effective.
?Some of the best marketing uses [as one aspect of an integrated approach], infomercials with fat, ugly people telling you how they lost 850 pounds taking placebo pills filled with polyester packing material,? Stevens writes. ?Art? No. ROI. Yes. Yeah!?
Len Short, AOL's EVP of brand marketing, defended the spots to USA Today, saying that they were designed to generate buzz, and as such, have succeeded admirably.
?We wanted to get noticed at any cost and get talked about,? Short said.
Cable operators have been doing a far better job promoting their broadband Internet service, and haven't had to rely on (presumably) pricey celebrity endorsements or unnerving sexual innuendo.
One of the most successful efforts has been at Cablevision, which has done wonders with its Optimum Online HSD service. Thus far, the MSO has signed up 22% of the homes in its service footprint, reaching more than 850,000 customers as of March 31. The company expects to top the 1 million mark by year's end.
Much of that success could be traced back to Cablevision's sister retail outlet, The Wiz. By marketing Optimum Online as a retail product in a retail environment, Cablevision was able to reach a huge pool of potential customers and save on truck rolls simultaneously.
Unfortunately, The Wiz proved to be untenable, and the chain was dissolved in February after bleeding up to $500 million in red ink. Before the padlocks were put on the last store, Cablevision had already begun a new campaign, dubbed ?There's no better way to learn,? which focused on children and seniors, the latter group being approached as a potentially lucrative untapped market. (A Jupiter Research report predicts that 16.3 million users aged 65 and over will be online by 2007.)
Here in New York, Time Warner Cable has also enjoyed a strong take rate on its HSD service, much of which is funneled through its proprietary Road Runner ISP. Although the company won't blow out its numbers on a division-by-division basis, TWC boasts more than 2.4 million high-speed Internet customers nationwide.
In marketing its HSD wares, TWC has made sure to sidestep some of the gaffes its corporate sibling has made. The Road Runner logo carries with it near-universal brand recognition ? Looney Tunes characters are inarguably pop culture mainstays ? and effortlessly conveys the central tenet behind broadband: speed. The long legs, the cloud of dust, the ?meep meep? all come together to point the consumer toward the inescapable conclusion that this product can really move.
Best of all, while AOL flogs its broadband package for $55 per month, TWC offers Road Runner for just $45.
You'd have to be a real birdbrain to miss the value in that proposition.
Back to this issue
|
