Blog o' RAMA

2009 Marketer of the Year Awarded to University of Rochester Medical Center

The 2009 Marketer of the Year was Awarded to University of Rochester Medical Center at a luncheon held this past Wednesday, May 20, at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. Of the 12 semi-finalists the U of R Medical Center received the top scores by all judges.  “Everything done right, great creative!” was what they said.

Other winners included:

Turn-Around/Start-up Marketer of the Year: Element K
“Great positioning, great concept, great results” were the comments from our judges.

Non-Profit Marketer of the Year: ESL Federal Credit Union
 “Good use of historical data to refine approach. Creative execution clear, attractive and consistent" said the judges.

On-line Marketer of the Year: Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield
“Tremendous amount accomplished in 5 days. Significant business results. Blend of online and offline techniques. Very impressive” were comments made by the judges.

All semi-finalists were judged in five areas, analysis of their business situation or opportunity; objectives and measures; strategy and approach; tactics; and overall results. You can read about one of their marketing case studies below.

Title sponsor of this year's event was again The Rochester Business Journal, and presenting sponsor the Simon Graduate School of Business, at the University of Rochester. Supporting sponsors were Cohber Press, Dunn and Rice Design, and John Smillie Photography.

Keynote presenter was Mark Ruszczyk, SVP Marketing & Sales at Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. Mark shared his insights and learnings regarding the creation of their Healthy Blue Campaign which earned them the Marketer of the Year Award in 2008. Our thanks to Mark for doing a great job as our keynote speaker this year.

The Rochester Chapter of the American Marketing Association is one of the fastest growing chapters among the 75 chapters of the national organization. The Marketer of the Year premier program which culminates a year of over 15 events, providing education and leadership in the marketing community. Speakers have covered topics such as Marketing ROI, transforming Walmart, Personal Branding, Web 2.0 for Sales and Marketing etc.. Each event has drawn over 100 marketers from all over Western New York as well as our many collegiate chapters.

Membership is a great value at RAMA. Currrently there’s a special promotion, which includes a $30 off the national membership, local membership as well as a $20 gift card, $200 off a national web workshop as well as a FREE access to AMA's Live Members-Only Webcast: “Destination. Success. Taking Control of Your Career in the New World of Work.

RIT Saunders College of Business Hosts Managing Innovation and New Product Commercialization Series

The RIT Saunders College of Business is hosting a unique executive education series titled Managing Innovation and New Product Commercialization. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from some faculty who have worked in the business for many years and will be able to immediately apply the information that they receive. Case studies, mentoring from local business executives, and vibrant interaction within the classroom will add to the overall learning experience.

This series is designed to provide individuals with the framework, tools, techniques, and latest methods to help them become more effective in developing new products and services for their organization. The focus will be on topics such as breakthrough customer needs, design thinking, new product development processes, organizational changes, and innovation. 

It is targeted to mid to upper level managers, business unit managers, and executives who are involved in the development and marketing of new products and/or services. Their research has shown that companies who send teams develop integrated plans and work together on implementation.

Here are some the key benefits: 

•    Develop an innovation and new product development strategy
•    Identify barriers to innovation
•    Understand the implications of disruptive innovations and industry disruptions
•    Understand what it takes to create value in the customers’ eyes
•    Creating and managing the innovative organization
•    Develop Market Attack Plan for bringing new products/services to market
•    Expand your networking community
•    Receive critical feedback from business professionals

This series runs for 8 consecutive weeks and takes place on Monday evenings beginning March 9th from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m and will conclude on April 27th. The cost of the entire series is $1,500 and dinner is included. 

A limited number of scholarships are available. Discounts for multiple people from the same company are available and teams are encouraged to attend. For more information and to register visit RIT Saunders College of Business.

95% of Super Bowl Ads Scored Online

by Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente

So were you one of the 148.3 million people that watched at least part of Super Bowl XLIII this past Sunday with the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Arizona Cardinals? It was the second-most-watched Super Bowl ever, just behind 2008's record-breaking  game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.

NBC said it did sell out of all its ad inventory getting $206 million dollars, which is up from the $186.3 million Fox sold last year for the game. So advertisers did pay more and got less viewers. I've been writing about the ads and promotions associated with Super Bowl XLIII on my blog and I asked the question in my last post of how many ads would actually try and get their money's worth by driving viewers online to extend the experience?

Last year I learned that 64% of the Super Bowl ads promoted their website after which I had predicted a much higher percentage. So I wasn't sure what to expect this year. Would the advertisers get it right and make their $100,000 a second ad pay off?

64% of Super Bowl Ads Promoted Their Websites

What a football game! While it was not a high scoring game, Super Bowl XLLI was close throughout all four quarters and turned out a truly unbelievable ending. Sorry Patriots fans, but the Giants winning the Super Bowl and beating what was the undefeated Patriots is one of the best thing to happen in this country in awhile.

Anyhow, from my initial opinion and comments that I've read, the NFL did a much better job than the advertisers. Yes there were a few good ads but also some pretty lame ones. There will be many different personal opinions regarding who liked what, and there should be since we're talking about an audience of over 90 million people. But all in all not many that will be remembered by next year's Super Bowl.

For the past two weeks I’ve been writing about the Super Bowl and all the ads and promotions associated with the big event on my blog, Donna’s Promo Talk. In my last post before the game I wrote about how the ads were integrating offline with online promotions. I drew from MediaPost's Joshua Stylman who pointed out that nearly one in five ads in last year's Super Bowl failed to include a URL and 90% of them lacked any call-to-action! So, my prediction for this year was that we'd see URL's in close to 90%, if not all of them, and that half would have some type of call to action.

To read the rest of this article and see how it netted out please visit my blog here. Then come back here and tell us your thoughts.

Seeking Opinions on Facebook's New Ad Platform

Social Networking site Facebook unveiled its new advertising platform earlier this week at a posh event they held in New York City. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "The next 100 years starts today, and it's going to be different," comparing his new platform to a once-in-a-century change for our industry.

If you're not up-to-speed on what it's all about, you're not the only one. It's pretty complicated and it will take some time to see if this really is the innovation of the century as he claims it is. I wrote a post yesterday in my blog, Donna's Promo Talk, that describes the new platforms and gives some links to other articles written about it. So take a look.

There has been quite a bit of conversation going on in the blogosphere regarding Facebook's  announcement that include many different opinions...some positive, some negative. So, I'd like to get the conversation going here and see what some of our RAMA members think of it all. Do you think it's going to change marketing as we know it now?

Steal a Base, Steal a Taco World Series Promotion

Since I'm a huge Boston Red Sox Fan I was eagerly awaiting the start of Game 1 of the World Series last night. To all you other baseball fans you must know that Boston overpowered the Colorado Rockies with a 13-1 win. So I just had to write about it today in my blog, Donna's Promo Talk along with an overview of Taco Bell's Steal a Base, Steal a Taco Promotion. Everyone in America will be entitled to free tacos from Taco Bell. So if you're interested to hear how the marketers at Taco Bell are really leveraging their sponsorship of Major League Baseball with this promotion read more here. Let's go Red Sox!

Brand Jamming and PROMO Live

I too concur that Marc Gobe's Brand Jam luncheon held last week here in Rochester by RAMA was indeed marvelous! It took me a little while to get used to Marc's French accent to fully understand all he was saying but once I did I loved listening to him. He says that's it's "time to be audacious with our brands" and make them more "people centric" since it's the people, not corporations, that the brands really belong to.

The week before last I was invited to Chicago to be a guest blogger at an event called PROMO Live, sponsored by PROMO Magazine. I've been writing quite a bit on my blog, DonnasPromoTalk, about this event and noticed some similarities between what Marc was saying at the Brand Jam event and from what Jim McCafferty, President of JMP Creative, was saying at his "Powering Up Your Creative" session.

Jim shared with us some great examples to help increase creativity including some of the many images he's collected that he uses to get his team's creative juices going. He advised us to really look at projects in a totally different way in order to get people talking about them and he said that "sometimes you don't have to look outside the box but instead look in someone else's".

Marc also shared with us some of  ways in which he gets his team's creativity going, or brand jamming as he calls it. Marc uses the sense of smell since people see colors through smell. His team did a survey and asked what color came to mind when smelling a new fragrance Ralph Polo was planning to launch. The overwhelming majority answered blue, therefore, they named the fragrance Blue and designed the packaging blue.

Jim gave us some tools to use to help with our creativity such as IdeaFisher which is a software program designed to speed up the creative process by working on principles of association and memory retrieval. Marc gave us all a copy of his book, Brand Jam, which outlines his process of crafting brand emotions through narratives and images.

You can find out more about Brand Jam at Marc's website Brandjam.net. And please hope over to my blog and read more about some of the other speakers that were at PROMO Live. Between all this advice it should spark some creativity in us all for awhile.

Avatar Promotion Gets Kids Back-to-School In Style

Since it's back-to-school week for most all students in the Northeastern part of the country I've been writing about back-to-school promotions on my blog, Donna's Promo Talk. This one in particular I thought I'd share with you here.

Taubman Malls has become the first user of an "Auto Photo Technology" developed by a company called Oddcast which turns any digital photo into a talking avatar. Taubman has created a Find Your Go microsite that's targeted specifically to students to help them "Find Your Go, Get Schooled in Style". On the homepage they have an "Intro to Avataring" (This is the first time I've seen the word used as a verb, so we may be on to a new addition to the Web 2.0 language). Anyhow, visitors to the microsite are invited to upload a photo...avatar it...style it...then record a message. Once their Avatar is complete they can then email it to parents and friends and also publish it to their MySpace page. It's really pretty cool.

So, I went to the Avatar Yourself page and created one myself using one of their default Avatars. I customized it a bit first changing the hair color, background and clothing. Then you can record your own voice message, type a message for the computer to speak or pick one of the prerecorded messages. I picked the message that humorlessly tells parents this isn't really me, but why I need this back-to-school stuff to succeed in school. I then emailed it to myself and here's the link if you want to check me out. They also have a bunch of download designs available such as MySpace Skins, badges and wallpapers.

Now the key objective is for the kids to create their wish list and get their parents to view it. Speaking of parents, they also have a section For Parents to "get the back-to-school 411 for you and your kids". It gives parental guidance on what's the trendiest back-to-school items and offers both parents and the students a chance to voice their opinions by voting on featured products. It can inform them to what's on sale at which mall and also gives them an intro into "Avataring". So, all in all this is a pretty cool promotion and website.

"Students, particularly teens, like to be heard and this talking avatar and trend poll are two ways for them to voice their thoughts," says David Goldberg, Taubman Vice President, Marketing and Sponsorship.

To launch the avatar program, many of Taubman's shopping centers will host in-mall events that feature Pixman -- people equipped with LED screens suspended over their heads via a backpack-like device. The head-turning Pixman will walk among shoppers educating them about the avatar program, directing traffic to center court. There, teams will hand out FindYourGo lip balm and show visitors how to create their own avatars onsite from the center's avatar kiosk or from home.

"Taubman is ahead of the curve. This deployment is a perfect example of digital and nontraditional coming together for an innovative and inspiring campaign that empowers and entertains shoppers," says Adi Sideman, CEO of Oddcast. "The students are going to think it's cool and the parents will be wowed.  It's the perfect viral marketing mix."

Unfortunately we don't have any Taubman shopping centers in the Rochester area. Maybe Eastview Mall should take notice to this promotion to attract more kids and teens.  Anyhow, the avatars will be available online through October, so be sure to check it out.

Social Media Builds both Business and Personal Relationships

Consumers today expect a steady supply of fresh content on the Internet, as well as the ability to participate in content creation. Social Media is the strongest component of Web 2.0 and according to Wikipedia, it “describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other.” These include blogs as well as social networking platforms like MySpace, You Tube and FaceBook. Through these technologies, consumers are sharing their experiences through words, photos and video.

Earlier this year I joined the social media network and became a blogger. My background is in promotional marketing so my blog, Donna’s Promo Talk, is targeted to marketing professionals. I first did what the experts recommend which is to browse, read and comment on other people’s blogs before starting your own. This helps to find your “voice” as well to create relationships with other bloggers in your field.

This past July I attended my first blogging conference to learn more and meet fellow bloggers. BlogHer 2007 was sponsored by BlogHer.org, an on line community founded in early 2005 by three women bloggers whose mission is to provide opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Already in its third year it was their biggest to date with about 750 attendees who took over the Navy Pier in downtown Chicago over a two day period. "A World of Difference" was this year’s theme.

I was inspired by being with so many women who were sharing their experiences, knowledge and wisdom with each other. Each session had a panel of lboggers who opened up the room for participants to ask questions, which is how you got the most information. It was pretty amazing to find technology being spoken about and taught to you by women (not men)!

There were many bloggers at the conference that have been doing it for several years and were reuniting with women they had met either in person or online. There were also many women like me still new or just starting out. I got introduced to many women by Yvonne DiVita, President of Windsor Media, who has a pretty well known blog, www.Lipsticking.com, Smart Marketing to Women Online, and who also made the trip from Rochester to attend. Yvonne is on the RAMA board and was a catalyst in getting this blog going (as well as my blog, Donna's Promo Talk) and she continues to be a regular featured blogger on RAMA.

Yvonne says "Social media and social networking isn't about the technology. It's about the people. People are a connecting force in both business and life and while the Internet has given the people a louder voice, social media has encouraged more people to speak up. Businesses that learn to participate will discover a world of opportunity at their fingertips."

Other bloggers I met at the conference in Chicago included Jenny Cisney who I learned lives just a couple of blocks from me here in Rochester. I overheard Jenny talking about Rochester during one of the sessions so I introduced myself. Jenny works for Kodak and blogs on Kodak's blog A Thousand Words while also maintaining her own blog, ljcfyi.com. I also met Breanne Boyle who works for AskPatty.com, an incredible blog written by women automotive experts who give automotive advice to women.

Blogs are becoming the voice of the customer and all businesses need to start paying attention to them. They can obtain great feedback from some things that people write in their blogs as well as just in the comments section. Traditional market research is changing. Businesses today need research based on consumer behaviors that are gathered and reported quickly and social networks are quickly becoming the best source for this.

So, I encourage everyone, not just marketers, to visit blogs, read them, leave comments and perhaps start their own. You may choose to focus on your business, release your personal passion or perhaps a little of both. Either way, everyone needs to become familiar with what social media is all about.

This is my first post on the RAMA blog and I'm honored to be invited as a guest blogger. My plan is to continue the conversations around social media as well as keep you up to date on what's going on in the industry as far as interactive promotions. Any comments and suggestions are of course welcome and encouraged.

Donna DeClemente, President - DDC Marketing Group