Yaffe Tidbits

Is it time you used radio again? Only if you're willing to do great creative.

I was presenting some fun holiday radio ads we wrote to one of our restaurant chain clients yesterday. We were all laughing and having a good time with it. I got to sing some silly songs. The account person joined in as one of the voices (and she did a great job, I might add). The client even said she had chills where we were finished presenting. We all were enjoying it so much, I was reminded how much fun doing good, creative radio can be. And that we rarely do it any more.  

In this digital age, it's easy to forget how fun radio advertising can be, if you do it right. Doing it right, of course, is the key. Radio's taken a hit over the last few years. Some of this is radio's own fault. Promoting 30 or 40 minute commercial free blocks of music may work for listeners, but advertisers know that if you're going to jam all the commercials into a 5 - 8 minute break, people aren't hanging around that long; they're punching buttons to other stations. Plus, local radio programming is going the way of the local printed newspaper. More dissappears every month.

Many of our clients have stopped using radio all together. Radio's not the sexy medium, like TV, or the hot new trend, like digital. It's a medium that often gets forgotten. But, it's also an underutilized one. Just take a look at this chart.

The chart shows the percentage of media time the average adult spends on each medium (black bar) vs. the percentage of advertising budgets put against it (red bar). You can see that the Internet has the biggest gap, by far. But that's rapidly changing. The next biggest gap is radio. Adults spend 19% of their media time listening to radio, but only 9% of media budgets go towards radio. That makes radio an underutilized medium where a marketer with the right kind of creative could be dominant.

Again, the key is not making radio an afterthought, but actually spending your time and money wisely. You need to do breakthrough creative to break out of the clutter. So few advertisers are doing good radio, that when one does - many people stop and listen. How often do you stop and listen to a new Budweiser "Real Men of Genius" spot when it comes on - just because you want to hear what they've come up with now?I know I do. And that campaign's been running for about 10 years now.

We've done a lot of great radio over the years. I love it. It's a great medium for creating theater of the mind stuff that really sticks with people. It might just be time to recommend radio again. As long as you're willing to do something different. It helps if you can get placement as the first or last ad in the commercial break, too. What do  you think? What's your favorite radio campaigns?

Mike McClure, ECD & Radio Lover

How can one airport create customer engagement?

In the new digital era of "the customer is in control" there are still a few places that the customer feels like he or she has no control at all. One of those places is the airport. We all have our own airport stories where we felt adrift in the crowd and nobody cared. But there is one airport that's trying to change all that.

The Indianapolis International Airport launched their twitter account, @INDairport, yesterday. It's part of a whole integrated program to make their customers feel more comfortable and more in control of their situation.. I know this because they pinged our twitter account to let us know about it. I checked it out and so far, it seems like a nice mix of airport related information and customer engagement. The personality has a nice quirky humor to it - it's friendly and different without being unprofessional. It lets airport guests get updates on flights and weather patterns and retweets customer comments and content. One customer shot a picture from her plane's window while sitting on the tarmac. Another had a picture of the trippy walkway.

I talked with Evan Strange in the Communications & Marketing department there and he told me, "With a new CEO, we were challenged to put our minds together, as an organization, and find new, innovative ways to make life easier for our passengers. Two of the best ways we found to do this was to revamp our feedback system and to engage in social media, so we can communicate directly with the people who use our airport the most."

In addition to twitter, the Indianapolis airport is also creating a blog and Flickr channel. Eventually, they will have a YouTube channel. I think that's brave in this post Dave Carroll/United flap era. But, also necessary. If companies are going to be a part of the new consumer world, they need to adapt and take chances. But, most of all, they need to take part. Digital and social media aren't one way streets.

According to Strange, "In the airport environment, people always want up-to-the-minute updates and want to be in the loop. Twitter allows us to do this. It is important to us that the airport has a voice and is able to communicate in a 2-way symmetrical approach, so we are engaged in social media to create value for our customers. Our goal is not to increase sales, but to create meaningful relationships instead."

I think the Indianapolis International airport is getting it right, at least so far. This isn't an experiment to them. They created this new airport to be passenger friendly, have diversity represented in their shopping experiences and even designed it in a way to reduce their impact on the environment. If an airport can commit to the transparency and engagement today's customers want, why not your company?

Mike McClure, ECD and frequent flier

How to lose followers and turn off fans in 1 easy step.

My long-time family dog may be dying and apparently that makes one company very happy. It's a company I will never do business with, although I'm sure I'm in their target market. All because they weren't paying attention to what their social media systems were doing.

Last week I sent out this message to my friends on Twitter: "Bad news: our dog Trixie, who we got as a puppy some 14 years ago or so, has heart disease. Seems to run in the family." A short time later I got a tweet from a company I've never heard of that said "@mikekmcclure We do preventive screenings" and posted a link to their site. Their was three things wrong with this. One, if they read the context of my tweet, it was too late for preventive screenings. Two, they only do human screenings and I was talking about my dog. And, three, they have the unfortunate logo that features a big word "Yes!" prominently. So, it almost seemed that they were gleeful about my pain. All unintentional on their part, but it made me angry at the time and came across as callous and extremely insensitive.

So, what was the problem on their end? Probably an automated program that scans the Twitterverse looking for key words like "heart disease" and sends out the message. There are a lot of good automated programs that can make managing a company's social media channels easier. Unfortunately, some of them can have this kind of result. If you monitor social media and the web for key words to respond to, you need to make sure someone is looking at the context they appear in. (I'm assuming it ws an error in programming foresight rather than actual callousness on their part). If you don't have time to monitor internally, hire someone. It's worth not losing customers.

It's a new world companies are moving into. It can be very exciting and open up all kinds of new venues and possibilities for them. They just need to make sure someone has their eye on the ball, so they are not alienating the very people they are trying to attract.

So, what do you think? Has this happened to you?

Mike McClure, ECD. @mikekmcclure on twitter.

Want to create video content for your company? It's easy.

According to an article in dBusinessNews today, "a company's online video - when widely distributed and search optimized - will help business owners grow their business more successfully than their websites." In that article they talked about how Google has revamped their search criteria to give more weight to video content. Over and over, every report you read today talks about how online video is the fastest growing trend on or offline. In fact, I went to a digital media conference last year and the experts were saying video was the hottest, fasting growing thing in the online enviornment then.

High production quality videos that really enhance your brand are nice and we like producing them. But if you are a company or individual who can't afford to go that route, there is an easy way to accomplish it. Get one of the Flip Video cameras. They only cost around $150 for a decent one and they are designed to make shooting and uploading video easy. It even has a built in editing program. It's a fairly rough editing system, but it is easy. They're so easy, we suggested giving them to various employees as part of a recent social media plan for one of our clients.

So, try one out and get yourself on film... er, tape... um...electrons? It could improve your google rating, engage your customer base and just be a lot of fun.

Mike McClure, ECD & talking head

Do you know what your brand's personality is?

Your brand has a public persona, whether you know it or not. Its personality can be one you carefully crafted or it can be something that just grew organically without any nurturing. It may be something different to each of your constituencies or a solid persona for all to see. But your company or brand definitely has one.

We just created social media strategies for a couple of our clients. One of the first things we tell them is that you need to know what your brand personality is. It's important to speak in one voice, whether it's in marketing, pr, brochures, your website or internal memos. It's doubly important once you get into social media, because you need to make sure the voice you're speaking in is one your fans and followers will recognize as being yours.

How do you discover your brand personality? It can be a simple as looking at your communications and asking people, both within and without your company what they think it is and then building consensus. Or it can be as intricate as the brand analysis and corporate culture discovery practices Yaffe/Deutser performs for clients.

What do you do if you have multiple brands within a company? Usually each brand will have it's own distinct personality and then the unifying company has a personality that encompasses all its parts. Look at it as a family. If you are the Jones family, each member has their own personality, but yet they have parts of their personality that make them all Jones.

Let me illustrate by going through our family of brands. The Yaffe Group has five different family members, each with their own personality:

Yaffe/Deutser is very serious, professional and respectful. It has a quiet richness to it. This is a personality befitting what they do. They are a consulting firm that does some pretty heavy and intricate brand, research and corporate culture work. They have deep relationships with their clients and delve deep into some pretty serious analytics that can have a large impact on the businesses they work with. The current corporate culture project they're working on is profoundly changing the way that client does business on so many levels, most of them not even dealing with marketing or talking to the public.

Barrelhouse Creative is just the opposite. They are brash, flamboyant, quick with a quip. It has a tongue-in-cheek attitude. It's a hired gun who comes into town, makes some noise, tells its story, fixes the problem in a blaze of glory and rides on to the next town. This personality also fits the kind of work they do and the relationships they have. They are expected to come up with something flashy, something bright, something that will cause people to take notice. They are usually hired for project work and are only brought in when a problem needs to be taken care of. Once it's done they move on the the next one.

Yaffe Direct is the geek of the family. They are all about immersing themselves in data and finding patterns no one else sees. They're smart and quirky. Sometimes no one really understands what they do. But, everyone expects brilliance and results. They figure out equations and develop new technologies and gadgets that do wonderful things. Sort of Einstein meets Mr. Peabody. This fits in with what they do, too. They take client's data, find patterns, use new technology whether digital or new ways of using old tech and discover ways to get better results than the client was getting before.

Yaffe & Company is the cagey street fighter. They've been around the longest and know how to get things done when you're in a bind. They're the kind of company you want with you when you're fighting for your company's life. They've worked with all kinds of clients, but have a strong background in helping retailers wage the every day battle of gaining share and moving products. They have a bit of McGyver in them too. Always finding new ways to get a leg up on competition. It's out of this company that the newest disciplines, like digital marketing and social media, are coming.

The Yaffe Group is the parent for all these siblings. its personality is that of a kindly father figure with a twinkle in his eye. He is always handing out good sage advice. Often dotes on his kid's accomplishments. And isn't above pulling the old "pull my finger" trick on the newbies. If you look at the social media communications from The Yaffe Group, you'll see that combination of factors building the personality through what is said and how it's said on the Facebook and Twitter accounts.

So, what's your brand's personality? Leave a comment and let us know. Or if you need help figuring it out, give us a shout. One of us should be able to help!

Mike McClure, Top Gunslinger and Storyteller