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!

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.

Many companies spend boatloads of money on the technology that supports CRM. But, CRM technology is no substitute for the people-generated activities that constitute the real power of the process.

There is a new and innovative concept developed by one of our clients, DataBanque, to support business managers and salespeople. We’re calling it 3MOSS™ — third party marketing operations and sales support. DataBanque essentially takes over the administrative nuts and bolts and much of the project management portion of the CRM process, and this allows your company’s sales team to concentrate on the fun part…schmoozing, trust-building and closing deals. DataBanque’s services, which include lead management, customer & channel management, marketing campaign management and data management, can be purchased a la carte or as a system.

I don’t know about you, but the notion of outsourcing the difficult and tedious parts of business development is pretty attractive to me.

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.”

Client: “What? But how will we make money? We can’t do that!”

FG: “You’ll make money the traditional way. Plus you’ll add some new services. And you’ll do it all online, so you’ll dramatically increase the number of customers you have without adding any significant overhead. You don’t even have to increase your advertising budget by much at first. You’ll be putting your ads online, a much more cost effective way to get the word out.”

Client: “We’ll give it some thought.”

FG: (six months later) “Have you thought about it?”

Client: “We’re still thinking about it.”

FG: (six more months later) “Have you thought about it?”

Client: “We’re still trying to figure it out.”

*Banking crisis happens.*

FG: (six more long months later) “Time is running out. Someone else will do it first.”

Client: (thinking “That’s ridiculous, no one will ever do that.”) “We’ve decided it’s not such a great idea. We’ll just hunker down until things get better.”

And then we see a commercial on TV for Ally Bank:

Sigh.

In hindsight, it is easy to see why clients would hesitate in taking our advice. As much as they want to believe our Challenger Brand philosophy and beat the competition, there are never any guarantees of success when you are blazing new trails. No way to measure anticipated ROI. No way to review what others have done, because they haven’t. No way to avoid other people’s mistakes.

We totally understand the client’s point of view: it’s troublesome to think you might not succeed. Sometimes the barrier to doing provocative things is fear of being laughed at or ridiculed. Well, actually, that’s a given…competitors will definitely ridicule and laugh at you…until you succeed. Then they’ll stop laughing. We know this because we have lived it.

There are reasons for clichés such as “no guts, no glory” or “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” We don’t make our recommendations lightly or without serious thought to the business consequences for the client. And we walk the walk.

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.

Art school is funny, though, because there’s a large hipster population in a place like that. People for whom it’s simply not cool enough to be into what’s cool; you have to have been into it BEFORE it was cool. Sure, maybe you love the current chart-topping rock band or hip-hop artist, but unless you were listening to them on bootlegs before they even signed with a record label, you don’t really GET them. Digging that movie that just came out? Shame you didn’t see the director’s early black & white short films – they were so much purer in vision. Naturally, I couldn’t aim for this kind of ultimate coolness, and I’m not sure I wanted to be that big of a snob anyway. Still, everyone wants to appear to be ahead of the curve.

In branding and advertising, of course, it’s ESSENTIAL to be ahead of the curve. Not TOO far ahead as to alienate people – but not so far behind that your audience finds your message to be old news by the time you get it out there either. There’s a happy medium to be found. A few years working in this business taught me that, but still, a desire to show that my personal life demonstrated some kind of inside knowledge lingered.

That doesn't look anything like a Primanti's sandwich, but good effort, Jon.

A few weeks ago, Fitting Group’s own Belinda wondered if the G-20 summit would elevate the city’s brand. Now, in the wake of the event, I can only confirm that it has. For weeks, the iron city was profiled positively in the international news media. NPR stories name-dropped beloved haunts like Jerry’s Records, and Jon Stewart used Primanti Brothers sandwiches in Daily Show punchlines. Sure, there were some unruly protests and some arguably overzealous reactions from law enforcement, but Pittsburgh was on the map again. More than that, Pittsburghers themselves reacted and prepared in a way that, I think, spoke well of our citizenry and showed that we’re ready to be taken seriously as what Newsweek called “America’s Venice,” or more poetically, as what a piece of confusing sidewalk-chalk art called “America’s Phoenix.”

I can’t tell you if the G-20 accomplished what it set out to do on an international level, but I can tell you that it did, I think, exactly what City leaders here hoped for. It showed that Pittsburgh isn’t a smoky steel town anymore, but a historic, cultural city with a bright economic future and a finger on the pulse of the green movement. It’s something that I figured out almost a decade ago now, settling down here years before even cutting-edge companies like Apple and Google set up shop in town. It’s a move I’m happy to have made, as well as one that I hope thousands of people my age and younger will be making in the near future. And yeah, I feel sorta cool about it. Maybe not pre-DeStijl-White-Stripes cool, but let’s say buying-a-home-and-putting-down-roots-in-an-upwardly-mobile-city cool.

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.

Entering to win awards is a tedious process that takes up valuable agency time, but awards can pay off with agency and brand visibility. When we win, it demonstrates the valuable partnerships we’ve developed with our clients. When we don’t, we learn what others are up to in our industry and why they’re excelling.

Most recently, Fitting Group won two awards on behalf of Butler Health System for the marketing plan behind the launch of their new Heart & Vascular Center — an IABC Award and a HealthLeaders Marketing Award. While we’re happy about winning, we’re happier that our client knows that our work is valuable and recognized by our peers in the industry.

These awards will encourage us to continue to think creatively and measure our campaigns effectively. Entering our work is a reflective process, from assessing goals to writing the campaign summary to the awards ceremonies themselves.

Awards are also valuable to our clients as tokens that they, as marketing and communications professionals, can use to convey to their colleagues how valuable marketing is to their company as a whole. Awards help our clients get internal support, because these honors not only show success but also prove that marketing, advertising and public relations are investments in the future of their company.

Now that we’ve recognized the value, pass the hammer and nails, because we’ve got some new awards to hang.

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.

Marketing professionals don’t make sales calls or close deals. They develop marketing programs designed to build brand identity and interest in a company’s product or service. The value of the sales leads or buzz generated by an effective marketing program is determined by what happens next. In short, a company’s marketing program will not be successful if it isn’t supported with an equally serious commitment to sales.

I believe that all companies, regardless of what they make, distribute or service, should see themselves first as lean, mean, selling machines. Without strong branding, marketing initiatives and continuous, robust selling efforts, a company simply cannot maximize its sales revenue.

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:

• The billboard in The Great Gatsby. When F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the jacket art (above) for his novel (it was completed before the book was), he loved it so much that he wrote it in – creating the billboard that displays the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The billboard’s effect on the characters – it judges them, reflects their desires and values, and sees everything they do – shows that Fitzgerald knew and appreciated the impact of advertising.
• The poetic (and promotional) writings of Charles Dickens. When Dickens was 12 years old, he worked 10-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse in London, pasting labels on bottles of shoe polish for six shillings a week. Years before he began selling his short stories and novels, this was his first experience selling to consumers, and he didn’t overlook the importance of marketing his goods. Here’s an example of a promotional poem Dickens wrote during this time:
• James Joyce’s Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, the central character in Joyce’s famous work, is an advertising canvasser. The stream-of-consciousness style that helped make this novel groundbreaking is therefore chock full of Bloom’s every thought about advertising and advertised goods. Like Dickens, Joyce wrote advertisements early in his career – he owned a theater and often wrote the ads for it – and the importance he placed on marketing to consumers came through in his novel.

A more modern example that I’m looking forward to following is Twitterature, a website launching in the Fall of 09 that will retell classics in 140 characters or less.

Truly great literature is recognizable and beautifully written – two very big advantages if you can translate them into an ad campaign. Check out how Shakespeare lends Vick’s VapoRub a hand in this advertisement:

Marketing and advertising are affected by thousands of influences from history and from everyday life, including literature. I’ve been able to use my interest in all things literary to enhance the work I do for our clients, and Challenger Brands can do the same. The brands that Andrea talked about in her last blog post, small companies that lack a marketing focus, can use what they know to enhance their brand – especially since often what they know best is their customer.

Inspiration for building brands and creating marketing campaigns can be found in unexpected places. If you want to combine what you’re passionate about with your branding efforts, I recommend doing what I just did – channel your inner grad student and see what you find. Your passion and your brand may have more in common than you think.

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.

Yeah, there are exceptions, there always are, but the industries with all the marketing bucks are obviously out to hurt me. You know who you are, cars, phones and fast food! If that weren’t enough, there’s always Billy Mays yelling at me about something, even though I know I’m not the target. But I have feelings.

Even Super Bowl commercials have been mostly disappointing. If it weren’t for Budweiser and E-trade, I’d have to watch the game (not really a fan). But come on advertisers, you need to loosen up and at least do something great for this event. It’s the damn Super Bowl!

You know what I yearn for? A campaign like MasterCard’s “Priceless.” Besides being strategically brilliant, it’s always engaging, even when they’re doing promotions. The sheer emotion of it marches on through the years, whether it’s humor or something that gets you in the heart, or in the intellect. Obviously, that’s why it marches on through the years. Bless you, BBDO. Also thanks for the M&M stuff. I always smile.

Okay, I’m done. I’m a child of Doyle Dane Bernbach where I was a copy trainee/ mail room boy, and we were doing Volkswagen (without even showing the logo), Polaroid Camera live on the Tonight Show, Barney’s, and other products that dominated the Clios. Oh, and these ads did one other little thing … created brands that sold like crazy!

Well, it’s time for my nap. I’m turning on the old flat screen.

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)

It kind of made me sick and I was thinking, “Does one need to be so graphic to sell lawn care pesticides?” But then, as if the visuals weren’t enough, the branding message penetrated my throbbing brain and I realized that the same company who was serving up these writhing insects, ( in high def, no less) was the very same Bayer that made the miracle drug, Aspirin. OMG! I put their stuff in my mouth!

Well, OK. The logical branding consultant in me understands quite well that Bayer Healthcare and Bayer “Other Stuff” are really not the same company. One is a healthcare powerhouse and the other…well, let’s just say, their chemists are focused elsewhere. But nobody watching television is thinking that hard, nor are they making excuses for poorly conceived brand extensions.

My advice? Bayer Advanced, get another name and don’t make the Bayer Aspirin brand manager hold you responsible for otherwise inexplicable tanking sales figures next quarter.

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.

The study found that users of Sprint Nextel wireless are:

• Most likely to be heavy users of radio – 22.7% spend three or more hours listening per day
• More likely to be employed in a blue collar occupation (nearly one in five) or as a business owner/partner or corporate officer – 36% more likely than other cell carrier customers

The same study reveals that users of T-Mobile are:

• Most likely to be heavy Internet users – 43.6% spend three or more hours per day online (22% higher than the national average)
• Younger – 43.7% are between the ages of 18 and 34, and 64.5% are between the ages of 18 and 44.
• More ethnic – 37% more likely to be Hispanic and 35% more likely to be African American compared to the general population.

As for Verizon and AT&T, those users are:

• Among the most affluent – 28.2% of Verizon customers have household incomes over $100,000 while 27.4% of AT&T customers earn the same
• Most likely to be heavy newspaper readers – customers of both carriers are more likely to spend an hour or more per day reading a newspaper

Based on this study, how would you expect each company to shape its messages and what advertising channels do you think they should use? Hmmmm?