By Francis Moran
The news last week that major international news agencies, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse, were going to boycott the news conference launching this year’s Cannes film festival in a dispute over restricted access to the festival’s fabled red carpet is an uncomfortable but not wholly unexpected consequence of both the blurring lines between the editorial and commercial departments of large media conglomerates and of the recognition that there is still a lot of money to be made from news content — at least, from certain kinds of news content.
Here’s the back story. The fabled film festival, which is the world’s largest and this year runs from May 12 to 23, signed a sponsorship deal with French broadcaster Canal Plus and with European pay-TV company Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The deal, part of a growing trend by media properties to extract more than just exposure from their sponsorship of events, gives the two sponsors a level of exclusivity over video footage from the red carpet, where the world’s stars and starlets preen for the attention of paparazzi as they arrive for screenings, and from news conferences, where the stars and directors of the movies meet the world’s journalists covering the festival. The festival has said that other news organizations would have restricted access to these venues for video-shooting purposes. The world’s largest wire services, which are well paid to serve up this video to their clients around the globe, have cried foul.
I’m not sure they should be.
I realise that media outlets, especially reputable media outlets, have always maintained opaque Chinese walls between their editorial and advertising departments but many of them in this modern era have been tearing down those walls themselves. The trend is most advanced in broadcast, where, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars are paid every two years for exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. An unchallenged outcome of this is that while non-sponsoring broadcasting companies can certainly cover the games, they accept that they will face restrictions on camera placement and access to athletes, and quite severe limits on how much they can actually broadcast.
Not all that much different from what the Cannes festival has imposed.
I suspect the news agencies are crying foul less out of wounded journalistic ethic and more out of a hit to their bottom lines. You see, event organizers like the Olympics and, now, Cannes have figured out that the pictures media companies acquire at such events are worth a lot of money. And they want a piece of this action. I believe we will increasingly see event organizers charge the media for access to this valuable content.
In a way, this has long been established practice on election campaigns, where journalists who want to travel on the leader’s plane or bus must cough up substantial amounts of money to cover the costs. While nobody would ever suggest this is any sort of cheque-book journalism, it does lock out the less-wealthy media organisations and, thereby, make more valuable the stories and pictures that those with access publish and broadcast.
As I said, I’m not sure I object to this trend. While the purist in me is concerned about a world where media have to pay for access to events and the implications that holds for media freedom and other vaunted values, the realist (cynic?) in me is obliged to concede that most media today are indistinguishable from any other commercial enterprise, producing and packaging the product they know will sell while leaving aside the stuff they know won’t.
Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the raw material?
Cannes, Olympics, journalism, cheque-book journalism, media ethics [\tags]
By Linda Forrest
Last night, I happened upon a special on CNBC about Coca-Cola called The Real Story Behind the Real Thing. It was a fascinating look at the soft-drink company whose grasp and usage of marketing is legendary. Legendary also is the grave misstep it made in the 1980s when it launched New Coke.
Pepsi came on the scene and was holding blind taste tests called the Pepsi Challenge. When asked, the majority of participants noted that they liked the taste of Pepsi better than Coke. This caused Coca-Cola to conduct its own tests, the results of which mirrored the Pepsi Challenge. Despite the fact that the recipe for Coke hadn’t changed considerably in the previous hundred years (the initial recipe contained cocaine, but just for the first few years on the market), the powers that be at the company panicked and ordered the recipe to change so that the flavour more closely mirrored that of Pepsi. Big mistake.
New Coke failed spectacularly and within months, the original Coke was brought back to market, branded as Coca-Cola Classic. Funnily enough, Coke gained significant market share when all was said and done, though the company’s mistake had the potential to sink the entire operation.
When one executive was asked whether it was all a stunt, whether Coke had planned it, he said that they weren’t that smart, and they weren’t that dumb.
While it all worked out in the company’s favour in the end, it could have easily gone the other way. Many lessons can be learned from this and I’m sure many an MBA student has written their thesis on the New Coke experiment.
Here, I’ll try to distill a few lessons that we as marketers can take from it:
1. Don’t panic. What Coke did was react hastily to competition that was offering a similar product at a lower price and that was using an innovative marketing message. Rather than assess its own branding and marketing issues, it immediately destroyed whatever brand loyalty existed for its products. Consumer products such as soft drinks have a more personal meaning than what the companies often give them credit for. Know your product, know your market, know your customers and act based on what’s best for those three, rather than solely based on what your competitors are doing.
2. Be willing to admit mistakes and correct course. The fact that Coke recognized the error of its ways and quickly corrected itself saved the company and the brand. If you make a misstep, it just proves that a) you’re human and b) you’ve got work to do.
3. Competition can drive innovation. Cola is cola, when it comes down to it. Pepsi and Coke don’t actually compete so much on taste or price as they do on marketing. The curvy Coca-Cola bottle is so iconic and distinct that in 1993, when the company changed its plastic bottles to mirror the shape of its glass bottles, sales were boosted by more than 40%.
4. Be authentic. When Coke tried to be something it wasn’t, as is so often the case, it didn’t work. Know who your company is, what your brand is and stick to your knitting. Especially in challenging economic times, companies tend to deviate from their branding. So often it seems as though diversification is the solution and so often the offering becomes too watered down or too off message and fails. If you don’t know who you are and what you have to offer the market, neither will your customers or prospects.
By Francis Moran
I can’t remember when or from whom I first heard the line, “Marketers should think like the fish, not like the fisher.” But I have always enjoyed it as a pithy summary of our marketing credo that says you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes when plotting your marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter how fancy your new spinning rod might be, or how pretty the fly is that you just put on the end of your fly rod, if the fish aren’t hungry for what you’re offering, they’re not going to bite. You need to know what the fish are looking for and then craft your marketing message accordingly.
Driving along the other day, I saw the truck in this picture and I drove around a couple of city blocks so I could come back and take the picture. I tweeted this the other day but I thought I’d also share it here because it is such a simple-yet-brilliant example of this precept. Enjoy.
By Linda Forrest
Mickey Mouse, that is.
I just returned from another glorious vacation to Walt Disney World, our first trip with our toddler. We had an absolute blast. The weather was great, the food incredible, our accommodations spacious and affordable, and as usual, the customer service we received was outstanding. This is our fourth trip to Disney since 2004 and every time, we’ve marveled at the incredible customer service and impressive systems in place at the parks, restaurants, cruise ship, hotels, even the parking lots to ensure the best experience possible for the guests.
In fact, Disney has written a (the?) book on customer service called Be Our Guest that details all the elements of superior customer service that the company works so hard to achieve. Most of the time, it succeeds.
Traveling with a little one, you’ve got a lot of gear to lug around. Inevitably, things will get left behind or misplaced. So exceptional is the lost and found system in the parks and on the entire property that even though we lost several items over the course of our stay, most of them came back to us – from our son’s beloved stuffed animal to our rental car keys (thank god!)
It’s the systems that the company has in place that make it almost impossible to do the wrong thing.
For example, when they’re filling the massive parking lots for the parks, there are dozens of staff in the parking lot directing traffic so that the cars coming in single file are parking in order, side by side, with no room for error. There’s no parking willy nilly, instead it’s an orderly process and makes things easy for the staff and the guests. Clear signage makes it easy to remember where you parked and trams shuttle guests from their cars to the front gate on an endless loop.
Another great example is the proliferation of garbage cans on the property. Extensive studies were done to see how far a guest would be willing to walk to deposit trash in the proper receptacle, rather than just throw it on the ground. Subsequently, trash cans were placed at these specific intervals and this, paired with the many people cleaning the park, results in an almost impeccable environment. It would be more difficult for guests to litter than to just place their garbage in the trash can.
How does Disney do it?
The company works tirelessly to gather visitor data, with researchers at the entrance to the park surveying the guests, and now even some touchscreens in rides that ask questions, ostensibly to enhance the rider experience, but clearly to also gather market data.
The amount of staff it must take to operate a park on a daily basis is bewildering, but there’s always a friendly “cast member” whenever you need one. I have yet to encounter someone there who doesn’t seem to love their job, though a quick search on the internet sees that some ex-staff refer to it as Mouschwitz, which doesn’t exactly communicate happy images. Still, I can only speak to my experience as a guest, and that, on the whole, has been wonderful.
The magic one feels at a Disney park takes a lot of work, but no company does it better and you’d really have to try hard to have a bad experience on those grounds. It’s a well-oiled, well thought out machine and what it produces is nothing short of, well, magic.
By Linda Forrest
Like many people, I rang in the new year with friends and loved ones at home, watching the famous ball drop in Times Square on television. With a little one at home, it wasn’t feasible to go out for the evening, and so when relegated to sticking around the house, it’s inevitable that we were drawn to watching one of the many new year’s eve specials on television.
We settled on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve, not because of the entertainers appearing, not because of any particular allegiance to the network it was shown on, nor because the television happened to be on that channel. Rather, we consciously sought it out, so ingrained into all our brains is the brand that is Dick Clark’s new year’s eve special. When I think new year’s eve and television, I think Dick Clark. The fact that Clark has been felled by ill health that has impacted his ability to host the program itself and so foisted Ryan Seacrest upon the viewing public is sad, to be sure, yet we still tuned in. In our case, not to see what J Lo would wear, not to gawk at the ailing state of the iconic Clark, but just because the program itself is such an institution, has such a strong brand.
Before we settled on Dick Clark, however, we wandered the proverbial dial, seeing what else was on. A lackluster performance by Britney Spears in a fountain in Las Vegas was the only game in town, television-wise, from 11pm when Fox started its terrible programming. Some would argue that terrible programming is keeping in line with Fox’s established brand, but I digress. It was sad to see Spears performing amidst a line-up of nobodies. Though it was a boost to the ego to think that they were letting just anyone perform on live television like that; maybe I’ll whip up a song and dance number for next year’s special. Stay tuned!
The other channel we had the misfortune of stopping on was CNN, the most trusted name in news. While Gawker has a thoroughly cheeky recount of the night’s events, to me this programming was the most egregious mistake by a big-name media company on a night full of trainwrecks. CNN has branded itself “the most trusted name in news” yet the buffoonery of a raunchy comic and a respected anchor was far beyond good taste. I wouldn’t trust Kathy Griffin to cross the road, let alone entertain people to ring in the new year. While Gawker points out that CNN, which is struggling in the ratings, needs Kathy more than Kathy needs CNN, it’s unfortunate that the network felt it had to corrupt its branding so flagrantly in order to attempt to lure viewers. As we’ve written about previously, poorly conceptualized stunts like this don’t work, rather, they tend to turn people off.
We’ve been marketers long enough that we’ve helped guide companies through rebranding and new identities and what we’ve learned is that your true brand is not what you thrust upon the marketplace but rather how your customers and the public at large identify your company and its offerings. That’s where Dick Clark got it so right for so many years and CNN got it so wrong. When you deliver something expected, customers are pleased. Likewise, when you provide something totally antithetical to what they’ve come to know from your company, they’re confused and put off. Valuable lessons to learn for all of us.
Happy new year to all! Best of luck for 2010; may the year be healthy, happy and prosperous for everyone.
