Wendy’s is ending their 8-month old (and often mocked) “That’s Rightâ„¢” campaign which featured people in red wigs in favor of focusing more on the logo and a new slogan–“It’s waaaay better than fast food. It’s Wendy’s”.
The campaign, which debuted during the season finale of “American Idol” in May, has generated attention, but hasn’t translated into improved sales, the company said.
“It was a love it or hate it kind of spot,” said Bob Holtcamp, Wendy’s vice president of brand marketing.
Evey year there are advertisers who don’t want to shell out the big bucks for Super Bowl commercial prices. They try to find ways to associate themselves with the big game – which doesn’t usually make the NFL too happy – which is why there are constant references to “the big game” instead of using the real name of the event.
According to MediaPost, the newest advertiser to take this route is KFC. Their tactic? To try to get a scoring player to perform the so-called chicken dance in the end zone.
The Yum Brands-owned company will pay $260,000 in the name of the dancer to its Colonels Scholars, a charity providing college scholarships. That sum could very well entice a grown football player to flap his wings.
The NFL is not amused. “This has nothing to do with us,” spokesperson Brian McCarthy grumbled. “This is Super Bowl Ambush Marketing 101. Everyone looks to draft off the excitement for the game.”
If KFC succeeds, that quarter million dollars will be chump change compared to the reported $2.7 million going rate for 30 seconds of air time. Rob Frankel, a branding expert based in Los Angeles and no big fan of Yum Brands, says: “If they pull it off right, it could be good. I mean, it’s a motherhood issue, giving money to charity. And it’s not a humiliating thing they’re asking a player to do.”
Frankel says restaurant chain El Pollo Loco (The Crazy Chicken), with units in California, Arizona and Texas, is identified with the chicken dance. “If I were El Pollo Loco,” he joked, “I’d put out press releases, saying to watch the Super Bowl for the player doing our chicken dance and save myself a cool quarter million.”
Rick Maynard, a KFC spokesperson, tells Marketing Daily that the company is reaching out to those players most likely to score during the game to “let them know about the offer.” KFC also is approaching half-time entertainer Tom Petty with the same deal. “There are lots of ways to advertise,” he says. “We think this is unique, and will get people talking about something that might take place during the game itself.” He calls the dance the “domain of bad wedding reception music nationwide,” but still thinks viewers will connect the dots from chickens to flapping wings to KFC hot wings, which is the focus of this promotion.
Just to be safe, KFC has lined up former Atlanta Falcons player Jamal Anderson, who was known for his “Dirty Bird” end zone dance, to be on site prior to what KFC refers to as “the big game.” “We think this is a fun and creative marketing concept that both fans and the media will be interested in, and we’re spreading the word through an online digital campaign,” Maynard says. PR is being handled by Weber Shandwick. The company is also e-mail blasting the nearly million who have signed up to receive news at kfc.com.
KFC is also running a consumer promotion wherein people can upload videos of themselves doing the chicken dance and win “the ultimate big game party,” including a flat-panel TV, a limo to bring in the guests, cheerleaders to fire up the crowd, a spread of KFC and a cleaning service for post-party tidying. Entries are made at showusyourhotwings.com, with the winner announced on Monday.
KFC isn’t the only company we’ll see doing this. In fact, there are probably too many to count that jump on the “Big Game” bandwagon.
Don’t know what this mysterious chicken dance is? Watch the video below from The Lawrence Welk Show where they teach their viewers how to do this god-awful dance.
Ideas on Ideas get serious again in The heart of the matter where they tell the story of a client who – *gasp* – suggested using Logoworks instead.
Although I know the power of design to affect an audience, I’m often reluctant to point this out when selling our services. Perhaps this is simply habit, but it’s a bad one that must be broken. I wonder if we need to temporarily put aside our talk of brand, strategy and execution, and consider our power to influence emotion. This is what we’re doing when we get people to stop and admire a wine label, laugh at a magazine ad, slow down to observe a billboard or put a promotional poster up on the office wall. So, why don’t we put more effort into selling these reactions, instead of the objects themselves?
Pingdom, who check is servers are up or down, have stumbled onto an idea… Are Apple marketing by downtime?. Since there really is no need to take a site down to add new products, are they simply using their fanboys pouncing on every server glitch as a viral marketing tactic to spread the word about new products by taking their site down for maintenence? Hmmm…..
Getty Images now has a blog. They’ve posted Behind the Scenes at a Crowd Shoot with a brief behind-the-scenes (windows media, ugh) video of how a creative photo shoot and film shoot were blended together if you’re curious.
Only two weeks and two days until Super Bowl XLII comes at us and we have some updates on the advertisers you can expect to see, whom on average shelled out $2.7 million for a 30-seocnd spot. As of last Friday, FOX was reporting one spot was unsold out of 63 30-second slots slated to run during the game.
Tide has thrown their cap into the ring for their first ever Super Bowl ad. Their 30-second spot by Saatchi & Saatchi, New York is scheduled to air during the second quarter.
“The Super Bowl is the one time you watch a show and don’t want to miss the commercial breaks,†said Suzanne Watson, Tide brand manager for North America at Procter in Cincinnati.
“Given the wide appeal for Tide to Go and the broad audience for the Super Bowl,†she added, “it’s a perfect fit.†Tide to Go, which was introduced in 2005, is particularly fitting for a Super Bowl berth, Ms. Watson said, because of its properties as a quick stain remover.
“There are thousands of parties that night,†making Super Bowl Sunday “the biggest stain-based occasion of the year,†she added. “With Tide to Go right there, you don’t have to get up to clean your shirt or pants.†The Tide to Go commercial will be supported by a wide-ranging marketing campaign, Ms. Watson said, that will include the Internet, public relations and promotions. Such nontraditional elements “can really connect with consumers outside the laundry room,†she added, “and in their daily lives.â€
“We haven’t been focused on how this TV spot will measure relative to others,†Ms. Watson said. “We just want to do the best in communicating with our consumers.â€
On June 17th last year Czech artistic group ZTOHOVEN (a pun meaning “out of it” when read or “a hundred turds” when spoken) interfered with Czech TV broadcast which innocently showed the weather, and altered the broadcast to show a “live” nuclear explosion. They simply hooked up their camera to the weathercast-camera and in real time broadcast their own shots, which showed nuclear explosion. The results seen below, were quite convincing. This was the art groups creative (and rather techie clever) way of warning about media manipulation.
This NY Times article helps explain why it’s so hard to think outside of the box…the box that you created!
As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
webvideoreport.com has a bit on this – advertising on YouTube requires a $50,000 spend within 90 days for example. Other user generated content sites like Metacafe ranges between $10 CPM to $35 CPM, Break.com placements range from $10 CPM to $35 CPM and a pre-roll video in the music section of MySpace.com (15-second video with a 300×250 pixel ad unit) carries a $25 CPM. On “Telly replacing” sites such as NoGoodTV CPMs range from $15 to $40. Meanwhile on Wall Street Journal the CPM for video on WSJ.com is a whopping $90.
15 below project was born on Taxi’s 15th anniversary. With it TAXI want too create ideas that give back to the community. Their first initiative is survival gear for the homeless – a jacket lined with pockets that can be filled with newspaper which keeps people warn even when temperatures drop to -15 degrees. The coat is made from Aquamax, a waterproof, breathable fabric laminated with a nonporous membrane. Taxi plans to ship 3,000 coats in 2008 to cities where Taxi has set up shop, including Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Vancouver, and New York.
“I never felt cold, it was perfect,†Mykolyn said in an interview with DigitalJournal.com. “I had to test it out, because as a creative director I’m the last signature on a piece of advertising, so I wanted to bring that same level of high standards to this coat.â€
The comedian is talking to beer brewer and perennial Super Bowl advertiser Anheuser-Busch about appearing in a spot during the Feb. 6 game on Fox, sources told The Post.
Assuming the spot makes the cut, Ferrell would appear as his character from the upcoming 1970s basketball comedy, “Semi-Pro,” opening Feb. 9.
According to the article, other celebrities we should expect to see include Justin Timberlake for Pepsi and Carmen Electra for Hershey’s.
Additionally, AdAge is reporting that Nissan Motor Co. is quietly mulling a large spot buy that would allow the automaker to run lots of local ads on various Fox TV stations and affiliates during the game.
A Nissan spokeswoman said she could not “confirm anything about our plans for the Super Bowl,” but one person familiar with the matter said the automaker is planning to advertise its Murano, a so-called midsize crossover that pairs the driving experience of a regular car with some of the features of a sport utility vehicle.
Other Super Bowl advertisers expected to show include Coca Cola, Audi of America, Bridgestone Firestone North America, Cars.com, Frito-Lay/Doritos, General Motors/Chevrolet, GoDaddy, NFL, Disney, Kraft/Planters, Unilever, SalesGenie.com, Hyundai Motor America and FedEx.
Watch out for the game Polar Peril which has sucked the life out of the teeny amount of billable hours we have this week anyway, all the adlisters are currently wagering who might get the highest score. I think the top player in our posse right now is Marcus Engstrand with 441.
Decorate a stranger this on the other hand is something I can get – uh – behind. Sneak up on a stranger and decorate then while friend documents the whole thing & post to site! It’s like attack of the killer tinsel when done right!
Oddest form of flattery (?) this year: Someone has started a site called the Ad Rag where “bad advertising comes to die”. That feels oddly familiar but I can’t put my finger on it. I guess they couldn’t take adrag.com or even ad-rag.com because yaknow, I own those. (Sadly, we had to switch to the commercial-archive.com domain back in April 2006 because Norton Internet and other adblocking software were blocking our ad-rag domain errounously.)
I didn’t even know that Starbucks had drive-throughs, I mean if they do then why the hell does Britney Trainwreck Spears keep stopping for her double-grande-3000-calorie grande-venti-fix with whip cream while hordes of paparazzi cover her every step? Oh. Nevermind.
The cards were handed out at Starbucks locations last month, and this month at various surprise events along with free beverages or other treats.
The cards carry messaging that encourages people to do something nice for someone and then to pass the card along to someone else who in turn offers an act of kindness and on it goes.
Now news stations are reporting on random acts of holiday cheer – Chain Of Kindness Runs Through Starbucks Drive-Through somewhere in Florida – where presumably a Tai-Chi master started the chain to teach the impatient guy behind him a little zen. Yeah, that doesn’t sound in the least bit scripted. But that’s not the only report of such a chain, Pittsburg live reports that it happened in Starbucks in the Greengate Centre in Hempfield, and the intarwebs is a-buzzing with this story check the comments here at Metafilter for some “It happened to my sister”, though yes they are being sarcastic. Even Starbucks cups carry a story about someone passing the cheer on except then it happened in Riverside, California. Either this is happening everywhere or someone is just making this crap up – what do you think?
So, boingboing has been tipped to yet-another-website ripped off story where the originator found the copy via the copies dumb-arse hotlinking of the original sites images. So what does the original site do? Replaces all of the images with color co-ordinated pictures of dildos. Oh how terribly original, not – but at least they bothered to make it stylish! you thought we wouldn’t notice is a cool ‘badland’ blog for design of all sorts though (and yes, there have been many many many of those too) worth a bookmark.
And in our inbox waits a ‘press release’ about yet another millionpixelcrappetycrap homepage spinoff – this time for each pixel bought they’ll supposedly plant a tree: www.pixelfortree.com. Even with the cute eco angle I don’t think I can take any more millionpixel spinoffs. Hey, here’s an environmentally friendly idea – shut your damn servers off already, OK thanks.
Here’s another thing I’ve seen before – Paris Hilton naked shilling something presumably not “Paris Hilton”. Flying spagetti monster, there’s not enough eggnog in this damn office if I’m gonna last another year of these reruns.
These links brought to you by the worlds smallest Xmas tree, created by TORKE portugal in response to the worlds largest Xmas tree.
Brainstorm, an Indianapolis-based branding and design firm, has expanded beyond .Think and partnered with North Pole, Inc. this holiday season to bring you this mirthful look at
http://www.brandrepublic.com/login/News/773065/”>Revolution is set to unveil its first ever Valentine’s League in 2008. The table aims to show off the sexiest (and single) men and women in the digital marketing industry.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
