Fitting Group met with the Comcast folks last week and learned all about the cool stuff coming down the pike for advertisers — both online and on cable TV. What we learned was that upcoming innovations clearly point to Comcast’s understanding that in today’s world, TV must learn to play the instant-gratification game in order to keep up and attract young audiences.

Most advertisers are familiar with Comcast’s On Demand service, which was its first attempt at providing subscribers with more in-depth information on a product or service. This was a good start, but it didn’t compare to the “seek-n-find” capability of the Internet. Well, in the very near future, subscribers are going to be able to push a button on their digital cable TV remote when they see an advertisement to instantly (with a double opt-in “yes” feature) request that coupons or additional information be sent to them via snail-mail or email.

This capability will open up endless possibilities for advertisers — if subscribers actually do it. As with anything else, it will take time to catch on. But, when it does, it will become as second nature as setting your DVR to record The Bachelor (by the way, you will also be able to hit a button on your remote when you see a promo for The Bachelor to signal your DVR to record it for you — instantly!). Technology and advertising — I LOVE IT!

No matter how good your marketing efforts are, if you don’t follow through — if you have a poor customer relationship management (CRM) process — you aren’t likely to see the results you dream about.

Spending your precious resources of time and money on generating leads and then failing to work at converting those leads to customers is almost as crazy as running really good advertising that attracts “shoppers” and then being closed for business. As in the movie Groundhog Day, in which the protagonist played by Bill Murray wakes up every morning only to find that it’s still yesterday, a marketer who lets leads fall through the cracks is doomed to a never-ending loop of unqualified lead generation.
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We’re starting a new file at Fitting Group. I’m going to call it the “turn down the heat and let it simmer” file. In this file, we will store all of the great and crazy ideas we have for clients and postdate them for 18 months to three years from now. We’re doing this to maintain our sanity.

In reviewing the work of our agency over the last three years, I began to see a pattern. In our desire to help clients get ahead of the curve, we have often promoted ideas that were viewed as too risky. So the conversation goes something like this:

FG to Banking client: (seeing the regulatory environment loosen up and allow more competition plus the trend in online banking) “We think you should change the name of your bank to UnBank. We’ll advertise that you’re a new kind of bank – completely transparent, with no hidden fees or evil practices. Unbank takes the pain out of the banking relationship for the customer. You’ll launch new products with no minimum balance requirements, no penalties for early withdrawal or loan payoffs, no ATM fees, etc.” (more…)

Senior Designer Andrew O. Ellis loves Pittsburgh. Read why.

I may have been one of the only kids in Michigan to have this card on purpose.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs patting myself on the back.

Why? Because I’m part of a small and exclusive group. I’m a young person who moved TO Pittsburgh and stuck around. And more than that, I did it before it was cool.

You see, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. One Christmas during the early 1990s, we came to Pittsburgh to visit relatives who at that time lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. I don’t know if it was the rivers or the hills or the dinosaurs or what, but something about this town captured my imagination for the rest of my childhood. Pictures of the skyline adorned my bedroom walls. Bridges became more fascinating to me than cars and trucks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins became my hockey team – a move, in Red Wings territory, that was about as popular as being, say, a Cleveland Browns fan in Steeler Nation.

In Detroit, most of the art and design schools were rumored to be straight recruitment lines to the now-crumbling automotive industry – a path I wasn’t eager to follow. It seemed almost too perfect that I’d end up attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I still had friends questioning the move as my high school graduation loomed, but I was feeling the sort of satisfaction that you feel when things start falling into place. (more…)

Advertising, marketing and communications awards are more than just fancy dust collectors for the office walls and lobby.

Awards for a job well done are the calling cards of excellence that communicate our worth to clients, prospective clients and competitors. They’re also motivators for employees to keep up the good work.

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George M. Elish, Executive Vice President of Rosetta Capital Corporation, joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.

No, this is not George Elish.

I have often talked with executives who believe that a marketing agency’s fee should be determined, at least in part, by sales results. When I hear this, I immediately think that they really do not understand the role of the marketing agency, and more importantly, perhaps, the fundamental difference between marketing and sales.

It also underscores why I believe that marketing and sales decisions are among the most difficult that executives have to make. (more…)

Fitting Group Account Coordinator Molly Schaefer blogs about branding & books.

Before I became a Brand Spanker here at Fitting Group, I was a graduate student studying literature at Carnegie Mellon University. People who know this often ask me how I ended up at a branding agency and if I’m able to apply my degree to my job. There are lots of answers to these questions – my education has made me an effective communicator and a strong writer and researcher, important skills in my field. And, while marketing and literature are very different, if you’re in tune with both, it’s easy to find instances where they overlap. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

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Award-winning copywriter Tony Jaffe joins Fitting Group as a guest blogger.

You’ve no doubt heard about the Golden Age of Advertising. At the risk of being cynical, there is no metal worthless enough to describe what’s happening in this age. I admit it – I watch a lot of television at night, subjecting myself to hours of safely boring commercials that make the shows they interrupt feel like Pulitzer Prize nominees. And thanks to some beautiful media buys and the rotten economy, the same spots run over and over again. And over again. To be fair, production costs are astronomical, and shooting more than one spot a year is no doubt prohibitive. Anyway, even if they had the budget you know they’d do more of the same just to keep it “interesting,” like the unusually unfunny Apple spots with John Hodgman. I especially despise these ads when they’re put on the Internet when all I want is information. I curse the Internet people as well, the greedy punks.

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So what do you think of when you hear the name, Bayer? If you didn’t say Aspirin, you either work for the company or you are a geeky chemist that knows way too much about Bayer’s subdivisions in Healthcare, Nutrition and Material Science.

OK, so Bayer is a huge company with roughly 75,000 employees and many, many important products that probably make our lives better. In fact, its tagline is “Science for a Better Life.” What could be clearer than that?

But, please Bayer marketing people, I beg you to have some consideration for the sensibilities of an innocent, unsuspecting TV watcher (me). I was watching one evening when I started paying attention to a particularly disturbing commercial that showed a vast lawn with a cross-section of the ground beneath teeming with squirmy grubs.

(View the commercial at http://www.bayeradvanced.com/advertising/ Click on ‘Season Long Grub Control’ under TV Commercials in the right-hand column) (more…)

It’s tax day. So I need something else to think about.

Since all cellular phone services are fundamentally the same, why would a group of people with similar demographic and psychographic profiles favor one over the others? Here’s another example of brand preference. Cellular companies, are you paying attention?

In a 2008 National Report, The Media Audit published a cellular phone study that reveals the demographic profile and media habits among customers of the major carriers are distinct and may warrant different media tactics to attract new customers (http://www.themediaaudit.com ). The study analyzes four of the major carriers – Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, as well as 15 additional national and regional cell carriers.

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