John Drake

One World, One Roar

How do you connect with an audience? Ask Katy Perry. With the release of Roar she asked high school students to submit videos that showed their school spirit and the winner would receive a concert on school grounds.

The winning video, from Lakewood High School in Colorado, is quite something. It's only one take, and celebrates all parts of the school, from football to debate. The Principal encouraged the effort around a line: one world, one roar. "Our big thing is it's about everyone, uniting the whole school, community and everyone around us," one student said. Over 80 high schools submited videos.

How do you entice this kind of fanbase? Encouragement and VIP treatment. Perry treats kids more like adults, properly encouraging them to be themselves and to make a difference. We see this in her lyrics and throughout her channels. She routinely pulls kids on stage during concerts and reportedly has Meet and Greets after every show, saying to each of them "hi, I'm Katy." 

The Importance of Continuity

They've been at this for quite some time. The granularity makes it great. The baby's toes in the plush carpet. The energy of getting after it. Sales were up 10% in their last earnings call.

"Brands in the real world – in people’s minds – are fuzzy, not precise entities. But that does not mean the time has come for us to abandon continuity. For let’s remember that the first imperative of branding is to make people’s purchase decisions easy. And that will only happen if brands are easy to think of in purchase and consumption occasions. Which means that one of the most vital and enduring tasks for marketing and communications is the creation and maintenance of memory structures. And that takes repetition and continuity."

All of that is true, and there's research to back it up. Sure, there have been other spots like this out there. But Home Depot has had continuity.

When Things Just Click

Elton John recently went over all of this recordings and pulled out the ones that meant the most to him. He recounted why to Cameron Crowe. 1970's "Your Song" was one of them and he said:

"What can I say, it's a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it. I remember writing it in my parents' apartment in North London, and Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, '...this is such a great lyric, I can't *#@* this one up.' It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in and we both knew. I was 22, and he was 19, and it gave us so much confidence."

Twenty minutes. It's so unpredictable when it happens like that. But sometimes it does. And then it's up to us to trust it and sort of leave it alone.

The Secret Formula For Successful Online Ideas

"The internet is a giant machine designed to give people what they want. It’s not a utopia. It’s not magical. It’s simply an engine of convenience. Those who can tune that engine well — who solve basic human problems with greater speed and simplicity than those who came before — will profit immensely. Those who lose sight of basic human needs — who want to give people the next great idea — will have problems.

Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company: Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps."

That's Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, from this excellent piece. Which sounds about spot on. For brands considering their own web presence, as well as those trying to build the next Twitter, or Uber.

$503 Billion In Ad Spending

By the end of this year global ad spending will reach $503 billion. This is up 3.5 percent over last year. Of this amount about one third will be spent in the US alone, which is larger than the next top six spending countries combined.  Sometimes we forget the scale of US advertising.

The most notable growth area is of course the web. But what’s important to note is that when we look ahead to 2015, with the exception of newspaper (which continues to take larger hits), most of the growth is siphoning, rather equally, from all other media. Which points to the strength of finding integrated ideas that continue to use multiple media.

The largest area of growth, per ZenithOptimedia, is mobile which will be up 81 percent this year in the US. Digital will become the second biggest medium comprising a quarter of all advertising dollars by 2015.

The Power Of Music In Advertising

Does music make advertising more effective? There are a few things we know for sure, like how music tends to make things more emotive. And when things are more emotive they affect us more deeply.

A way to measure this is with the Harvard Implicit Attitude Test that tracks the speed at which consumers answer questions about a brand; the deeper the connection, the faster the response time. In a recent study involving VW marketing, ads with music increased response time to brand-affinity questions by 11 percent over the same ads with no music signaling that a deeper connection was achieved by incorporating music.   

And IPA dataBANK recently compared ads with and without music and found that the ads with music enhanced their effectiveness by 20 - 30 percent on achieving the desired business results tied to the ad.

The Consumer Buying System

I go back into A Master Class In Brand Planning rather frequently. There's no finer collection of planner thinking than that of Stephen King and I don't believe the industry talks about his work to the degree that we probably should. So it's always nice when some of his thoughts re-emerge.

Canalside View has a great post that unearths "The Consumer Buying System" for modern practicality and general helpfulness. It's about how consumers buy and, more so than the process itself, the questions that it poses are perhaps its most valuable asset for planning. 

A great read as all of Martin's posts tend to be.