ChasNote

From Gizmodo:

“This ad for Procter & Gamble’s Rejoice conditioner uses the tangled mess of power lines in Bangkok to get its message across.”

Says Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble, (from Ad Age), “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

“That’s not to say he believes P&G should end all involvement with Facebook. He cited Facebook applications as a potentially valuable vehicle for advertisers, one in which they can create an environment that’s favorable for their brands and consumers alike.”

It’s great when advertising drives sales growth that you can attribute back to a particular campaign, such as Jones Soda’s Graffiti drawing contest, which they called out in the companys Q2 2008 earning’s call:

“We ran two very targeted online My Jones programs on Facebook’s Graffiti application along with the very popular I Can Has Cheezburger site. These programs along with increased awareness of My Jones drove our online sales to double versus the same period a year ago.”

But often marketing programs work with more subtlety, building brand preference that ultimately motivates customers to buy products (and, if done exceptionally well, to buy those products at a premium price over competitive wares) even though all the transactions don’t occur as impulse buys triggered by banner ads or 1-800 phone numbers. Sometimes the best marketing is hard to measure.

Microsoft’s recent TV commercial for Windows Vista got me thinking about measurement. The spot, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, is pretty funny, but one might argue that it’s hard to see how it will drive sales or bolster confidence in the Windows Vista brand among computer users. In fact, much of the punditry is panning it (see a round up at Techdirt). Perhaps Microsoft itself has doubts; company representatives are calling reporters to explain the campaign. And Microsoft is hiring 155 Windows Vista “gurus” to deploy in Best Buy, Circuit City and other retail stores to do what the advertising may not — close the deal.

If we had a cost-per-guru scale, where naturally-occurring brand evangelists each added a point and paid gurus each subtracted one, Microsoft would start this campaign with a negative 155.

On the flip side, marketers that take a more conversational approach to advertising can launch campaigns in positive territory on the “CPG” gauge. I’ve posted a few examples here at ChasNote of conversational marketing programs that FM has played a role in. The Luvs unit of P&G, which built an ad campaign around a parenting-content site called TheMomSpeak, came out of the gates with a positive 1, when online retailer Momma’s Jewels plugged the site in its own customers newsletter. Intel’s sponsorship of PopURLs, the Blue Edition sparked 59 blog reactions, all positive as far as I can tell, according to Technorati. Or the 222 reactions to American Express’s OPEN Forum blog, which licenses content from leading small business authors.

I know, I know. I’m comparing apples to kiwis, maybe fish to bicycles. First off, some of those blog reactions may come from a single blogger, so it wouldn’t be fair to give Intel +59 or Amex +222. And maybe some negative sentiments are expressed in posts where I don’t read the language. There’s a difference, too, between a blogger writing a post and pointing his or her readers to a brand, and a guru making a 40-hour-a-week job of evangelizing a brand. Finally, it’s not an indictment of your advertising creative to also have a smart and aggressive retail strategy (like Microsoft’s Vista gurus or Apple’s “genius bar” staffers) or paid employees who share the gospel from public blogs (like GM’s or Sun’s). Hey, my cost-per-guru metric is still in beta!

But our industry would benefit from a deeper look at the amplification effect (or attenuation effect, as the case may be) initiated by advertising. The data is there; we just need to make better sense of it.

Caveats, disclosures and apologies:

One noteworthy FM campaign that felt the wrath of negative gurus is written up (defensively, my critics tell me) here.

In a recent post on The MomSpeak, a site featuring editorial content from several parenting bloggers and sponsored exclusively by P&G’s LUVs brand, Liz Gumbinner of CoolMomPicks offers tips on stylish accessorizing, even after having kids. Among them:

“Rule of thumb for jewelry: If you wouldn’t have worn it before kids, don’t wear it now. There’s plenty of truly great keepsake jewelry out there. And those teething necklaces that claim to look just like stylish necklaces? They don’t. Really. One exception: Momma’s Jewels, whose sterling teething pendants are fantastic.”

The folks at Momma’s Jewels took notice, and featured the quote (along with a link) in their customer newsletter. Must be nice for P&G to have other companies shouldering some of their advertising load!

(Credits: Tiff Liu at Mediavest along with Matt Trotta, Nicole Cook, Leona Laurie and Jana Hartz at FM.)

P&G’s Luvs brand, in cahoots with several FM parenting authors, launches The MomSpeak, a “parenting conversation hub.”

More on this shortly.

Following the controversy over P&G Productions’ sponsored storyline featuring two men kissing, P&G has opened a toll-free feedback line. What a simple and great idea: I bet the mere act of listening will dilute the critics’ venom, like Dell’s Direct2Dell site did following the Dell Hell blogstorm.

This forum — albeit an old-school telephone forum — does something else, too. It creates a platform for discussion (in a sense) among opposing points of view. The conservative group American Family Association started the fight with P&G. By opening the toll-free number campaign, P&G has let other customer constituency fight back on their behalf:

“Celebrity gossip site PerezHilton.com this morning posted a reference to the ‘Nuke’ controversy, urging readers to call P&G’s hotline in support of the couple. By this afternoon, Kip Williams, a blogger on the HuffingtonPost.com, also had weighed in, also asking readers to call P&G’s hotline in support.

“Perez Hilton, with an Alexa traffic rank of 430 indicating daily visits by 2.6 million people worldwide, and the Huffington Post, with an Alexa rank of 687 and around 2 million daily visitors, would appear to carry more weight in popular culture than Donald Wildmon, whose AFA.net site has an Alexa rank of 59,596, indicating daily visits from around 30,000.”

Let the big boys and girls wage battle while you sit safely on the sidelines. Man, I wish I has used that technique on the school yards of my youth. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that P&G choreographed this ingenious act of self-defense, given it makes the #1 antibacterial soap worldwide, Safeguard.