The Media Buyline

Pictured:  Olympic hopefuls Sam Stitt (Rowing), Jamie Nieto (High Jump), Me and Brandon Pelletier (Parapan AM Games).

Cox Media hosted an Olympic presentation last week. Attendees were graced with an opening choral show and Olympic hopeful presentations. You might not know, but cable channels will air more than 1,750 hours of television coverage of the games. If you’re a fan of a specific sport (for me it’s volleyball) most likely you’ll find more of your sport coverage on a cable network.  CNBC, NBC Sports Network, MSNBC and Bravo will all carry Olympic coverage.

This summer the Olympics will take place in London starting on July 27.  Cox Media and NBC have Olympic packages available. Let me know if your business would like to be an an environment of excellence.  Top brands like Coca Cola, GE, Kellogg’s, Hilton and Anneuser Busch choose to advertise during the game coverage.  Possibly you should too.

What used to be called Sophie 103.7, a soft rock format, since March 29 is now San Diego’s Energy 103.7.  The energy format plays top 40 hits targeted to reach teens and adults aged 18-34.  According to industry insiders, as the ratings dipped on Sophie the station managers looked to a radio station in Los Angeles for inspiration to change to Energy. Tip, if you and your customers like hip hop and house-type music, you’ll enjoy this new station.  It might be a good way to reach the elusive young audience marketers seek.

According to the 2011 Media Audit Report surveys, newspaper websites continue to be the main players in local markets. Newspaper websites took 16 of the top 25 spots. Television websites, the biggest competitor to newspaper sites, took three of the top five spots and five of the top ten. The Salt Lake City’s Mormon Church owned TV station, KSL-TV (ksl-tv.com), placed as the top TV site and WRAL-TV (wral.com) in Raleigh NC took second.

The top newspaper site is Advance Publications’ AnnArbor.com. Hearst Newspapers’ sister company Hearst TV had the number four slot with WMUR.com. Fifth place was Gatehouse Newspaper’s Springfield, IL Register.

Of the top media markets, the Washington Post’s site WashingtonPost.com reaches the highest percentage (46%) of adults in the market.

It should be noted that The Media Audit president noticed that newspapers with strong print penetration had the healthiest websites.

Ask me how your company can be a part of this show produced by Live Fit Films. Watch below.

If you were like me and just wanted to watch the Superbowl for the commercials but didn’t get a chance to sit through the whole game here’s a link to those commercials. I personally liked the Ferris Bueller ad but didn’t think the car was the right fit for it.

Watch Superbowl ads here

For the past three years now, I’ve been a Brand Ambassador (a BA as the 20 something co-worker who does that kind of work full time described it) for the San Diego International Auto Show over the New Years’ weekend.  This year, one of the brands I represented and helped register people to test drive was the Fiat 500.  During the training day before the event, we found out that the Fiat brand is being re-born in America after over 30 years of sleep.  They shut down US sales in the early 80’s. Most of you have probably seen an ad for the car featuring J-Lo.  Our product specialist trainer said Lopez has four of the Fiats and as a consumer you can custom make one with your favorite colors and styles–sort of like all the gizmos you can buy for your I-phone.  They even created a 500 by Gucci and it’s available in limited production in both black and white styles.

So, as I was registering people to test drive both the hard and cabriolet rag top versions of the car, my eyes couldn’t stop following a dad and his two daughters that were eager to test drive the Fiats.  One of the daughters looked just over the “I just got my driver’s license” age and the other one looked like she had a couple years to go before a license was in her hands.  The girls reminded me of my younger sister and me at that age–but when we were growing up all the cool kids had VW Rabbit Cabriolets.  I started wondering if the Fiat 500 would launch another teen revolution like the Rabbits did for my generation.

Fiat launched sales of the car in late 2010 and fell short of their sales goal for 2011 with some industry flak following the under-expected goal but I think the brand is just getting started and will make up for lost sales this year.   They have a Parisian bred marketing officer who could quite possibly reignite the Euro passion the states had in the 80’s and they’re also launching a male-centric model soon.  With their new ad agency Doner creating their TV ads, expect to watch what’s happening with the brand during the Super bowl games.  With good gas mileage, a reasonable cost and a coolness factor, my bet is Fiats will be all over the parking lots of high schools and colleges soon.

Do ad jingles make an auto dealer’s advertising campaign successful?  One of the clients I worked with in my early advertising agency years was the National City Mile of Cars.  The Mile of Cars is a group of auto dealers in National City that get together to advertise their area.  I was tasked with scheduling and negotiating mostly Television advertising time and some radio carrying the jingle, “Wanna get on down, get on down to the Mile…”

The ads hit every local San Diego market TV station consistently. It was hard to find someone who hadn’t heard the jingle in those years.  Sometimes I’d sing the song when I talked with a new person about my work.  When the Mile of Cars changed agencies in the early 2,000’s I wondered if they stopped advertising. I couldn’t remember their ads and still question if they cut back their media spending or if it’s just that their ads aren’t as memorable.  Around the time of the split, I remember too that the dealers were all crying for a new ad and the partner creating them didn’t want to do it. The dealers said the ads were too tired, but I think now they should’ve stayed with the jingle, or at least updated it.

Our agency was responsible for counting the number of cars that were sold the weekend prior at each of the Mile’s dealerships and Mossy Nissan was by far the dealer that sold the most cars there.  It wasn’t even a contest for a close second, and guess what, they also had a jingle, “Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan moves you.”

As I was doing research for this article I saw a post on Yelp and someone had commented they were singing the Mossy Nissan jingle at work and couldn’t get it out of their head.  Sometimes as consumers we think jingles are annoying when that happens but top of mind awareness is the goal of most advertising campaigns and that’s what a repeated song in a consumer’s head does.

Growing up in Los Angeles, my siblings and I used to sing along whenever the Cal Worthington and his dog spot commercial showed up announcing “This is Cal Worthington and his dog spot”. Then the jingle would start with a bouncing ball following the lyrics, “If you want a car or truck go see cal…”   Those ads, with various modifications, ran for 30 years, from the 1960s to the 1990s and aired on every Los Angeles area Television station.  In the late 1980s during the time of his dog spot commercials, he spent $15 million on ads and it was the most ad expenditure of any auto dealer at that time.  Earlier this decade, Worthington’s dealerships spanned across the West and at its peak he had 29 dealerships, owned three shopping centers, and one office tower grossing $600 million a year.

So, based on these successful examples, I’d say jingles are a good way to advertise an auto dealership along with a healthy budget to place the ads on air.

But, jingles aren’t just limited to car dealerships.  According to Forbes.com, the best-ever advertising jingle is Coke’s “I’d Like To Buy the World a Coke”.

The 2011 San Diego Ad Club’s Mingle Bell party held at Fluxx nightclub in downtown San Diego was a big success for the industry bringing in close to 600 advertising and marketing executives to the event.  Eleven communications industry associations came together.  Here’s a short movie of the evening.  Photos include people from the advertising industry.

Bill Degisher, KGB Sales

Debra Turner and Lynda DiLorenzo, Entravision

Audrey Patterson, Ark Marketing

Janene Roberts, Popcorn Press & Media, Inc, Maureen Sweeney, Sweeney Media, and Becky Kloetzel-Roberts

Fishbrand Advertising

Marty Leonard, Creative Printing and Die Cutting

Marco Coleman, KSWB-TV Fox 5

Mark Dobbins, Half Price San Diego

Fran Mallace, Cox Media

On March 4, 2009, Cox Media in San Diego held a seminar titled How to Market Your Business in a Challenging Environment.

The speaker, Jim Doyle of Jim Doyle and Associates focused on how “Concentration is the Key…To All Economic Success.” Doyle asked us in the audience to list the top three shampoos we could think of.  Once we all wrote down our shampoo thoughts, he mentioned how our brain has files and we store only about three names in each of those files.  Since there are hundreds of different shampoo options, that category is pretty full.  So, he asked how many people wrote down Head & Shoulders.  About 15 people shot up their hands.  Then he mentioned, if he had asked us to write down our top three choices for dandruff shampoos, most likely the majority of us would’ve written down Head & Shoulders.  The point, he stressed, is that it’s dangerous to be all things to all people in your business because most people don’t have enough file space in their brains to remember your company.

So, how do you present and advertise your business in a different way so that you’re one of the top three in your category?

1.  Come up with a strategy before you do anything. And, if you’re trying to be all things to all people, how can you focus on a niche that you can own in people’s minds?

2.  Find the strength of your business.  Make your stake there.  If you don’t know, ask yourself what is the point of entry, the thing people come in for first?

3.  Where’s the opposition?  Is some other business known for your strength?  Have they advertised enough that they already own that strength in the minds of consumers?  If they have, is it worth it to go up against them or can you own a different strength?

4.  What are your resources?  How much money do you have to spend and if you’re going up against a number one competitor do you have enough money to do that?  If not, narrow your focus.

Doyle gave us an example of how a company, The Base Camp, in Billings Montana focused in a big way on a narrow target.  They are an outdoor apparel company.  In the past they had held a sale in November before the holiday season.  They were doing OK, but worried that people were coming in for the sale in November to do their holiday shopping.  They wondered, were they giving discounts to customers that would’ve already come in during the holiday season.  In 2003, they changed their strategy and decided to have a Black Diamond Glove sale in November.  They charged $14 a pair.  That year, they sold 700 pairs.  Three years afterward, they sold 6,000 pairs and drove their total sales up by 40%. Two years after that, in 2008, they sold 12,000 pairs.  They are currently the number two retailer, after LL Bean, for Black Diamond Gloves.

What is your Black Diamond Glove story?