You’ve seen the scantily clad cocktail waitresses in the casinos.  The sexy woman posed on the hood of a car.  We know that sex gets men’s attention.

But does sex actually sell?

A new research study by Brian Knutson of Stanford suggests the answer is yes; at least, that heterosexual men are more likely to take financial risks after being subjected to positive emotional stimuli—in the case of the study, erotic photos of a man and woman.

Why should digital marketers and publishers care?

As digital content and advertising become increasingly intertwined (here’s one of many posts on that topic), and marketers and publishers get better about measuring the effectiveness of their efforts (read more in our mini-eBook on social media performance management), we can expect the trend toward sex in advertising to be further invigorated (pun intended), at least in advertising that targets men.

And as social media becomes an increasingly effective marketing tool, we can also expect more of the digital equivalent of those cocktail waitresses.  The Stanford study alluded to the particular relevance in online gaming (gambling) businesses, and I noticed the effect firsthand when checking out XuQa.com, an online casual gaming community co-founded by Murtaza Hussain, co-founder and CEO of PeanutLabs and the subject of a recent DigitalPodcast interview.  Many of the most popular gaming rooms in XuQa are hosted by very attractive women (or at least hosts with photos of very attractive women), and the formula seems to be quite successful there.

By the way, for our female readers (my wife included) who by now are gloating over the superiority of your half of the species, beware:  Mr. Knutson is planning to test women’s responses in the future.

Andrew and Alex joined Forrester for its 2008 Marketing Forum, which focused on the challenge of customer engagement in a digital media world.  This second series of articles focuses on case studies of companies using interactive applications as the hook for building communities of superfans.

Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand
Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand

Nike’s Jordan Brand has developed a couple of immersive experiences for highly engaged fans.  The experiences start with deep insight into these “superfan” needs, and build intense community engagement for these hardcore fans, but are small scale communities relative to the scope of the Jordan Brand.  Which raises the question, are these high ROI applications for engaging and activating superfans, or are they so focused on the hard core that they are failing to engage the brand’s mass market?  Read on and share your opinion…

Emmanuel began by sharing background on Nike, whose headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon is like a Disneyland for adults, and its Jordan Brand division, where Michael Jordan (MJ) still deeply interacts with the brand, the same way that he was engaged with the game of basketball.

Mentally, or digitally, cut to a stirring, inspiring Michael Jordan video (videos can be found at Nike’s site for the Jordan Brand, Jumpman23).

The Jordan Brand.  Nike approached Michael Jordan in 1984 to have a signature shoe built around him, a completely novel concept at the time.  In 1996, the Jordan Brand was born as a division within Nike.  The brand has 110 people versus the Tiger Woods Brand’s 400 people, and both brands support the same amount of revenue.  Nine out of ten people own (or have owned) Air Jordans, and the Jordan Brand is the second in the market behind Nike itself.

The Jordan Brand’s primary consumer is the core urban male 15-20 year old, highly competitive, a leader of the team.  These guys often know what the brand is doing before the news is made public.  The secondary consumer is 12-24 year old males and females, urban and suburban, not necessarily competitive.  Their consumers’ mind space includes social media, television, and the video game space.  The Jordan Brand does a lot of marketing through video games – with them, kids can see the entire line-up.  Most kids know what products they want before they get to the store.

The engagement philosophy for the brand is (1) to engage with consumers where and when they want (online!); (2) product and service together are critical to delivering a greater experience and engagement; and finally (3) the consumer decides.

The Jordan Breakfast Club.  A key platform for engagement is the Jordan Breakfast Club.  The challenge was to establish an authentic position for Jordan in the training marketplace.  Every morning, MJ and his teammates used to wake up and complete a workout regiment before he got to eat his four course breakfast.  So the Jordan Brand went after an unmet need of the target customer around training – everyone says that training is important, but no one tells kids how to train.  The Breakfast Club includes a simple peer-based assessment and a custom designed workout program that can be printed out or downloaded onto an iPod as videos for a huge number of possible workouts.  The Jordan Breakfast Club has 20,000 plus engaged users, and tens of thousands additional views on YouTube.  The Club also did a 10-city summer tour to reach thousands more at day long training camps.  The program won a 2007 Forrester Groundswell Award.

The Jordan Flight Club.  After building the Breakfast Club, the brand started getting more information about its consumers, and next started the Flight Club.  The Jordan brand has a huge “sneaker-head” following, and the Flight Club is about limited edition, one-at-a-time, high demand products for fiercely loyal customers who are willing to pay a very high price and avoid the disappointment of trying to get limited products through retail.  The brand got a lot of feedback from consumers in designing how the Breakfast Club would work.  Members of jumpman23.com got membership offers and the opportunity to invite two more friends – in others words, an “insider” offer for loyal customers only.  Demand went through the roof, with people selling their free invitations on eBay, and over 40,000 members joining in the first 45 days.

Emmanuel’s summary:  (1) create relevant experiences beyond the product, (2) service complementary needs of the consumer, (3) empower engaged consumers to be brand advocates, and (3) create and own communities where they are relevant and authentic.  The Jordan Brand’s next big challenge is to take these opportunities in the digital space and migrate them to the physical space, like the Jordan Breakfast Club tour.

Q&A Discussion

How do you share learning from the Jordan Brand throughout Nike?  We do case studies.  Things may work differently for us versus golf, and we use best practices.

The 15-20 year old market is refreshed every 5 years, so how do you target for the future, and specifically do you market to even younger (under 15) generations?  We try to communicate in a simplified format, keep MJ’s story relevant, and make great products.  We don’t market to the younger kids, but do try to emphasize success through working hard.

What do you mean that you’ve learned the hard way about ignoring customers?  We created a website where consumers could buy one-off products, and only created 6,000 units of a product that 1.6 million consumers tried to buy, crashing the site and generating hate mail.  We use sales data and forecasting to ensure that problem is not repeated going forward.  We’d rather overstock and deal with excess inventory than to have too little product and anger consumers.

For limited editions, doesn’t it help the brand to sell out so fast?  You have to appreciate the global effect of our brand.  Kids in Australia were getting their hands on US-only products; we responded to make the products available there.   We’re pushing to think more globally and satisfy demand, offering limited products in all parts of the world.

The Breakfast Club concept sounds great, but how are you measuring the true impact?  We’re not measuring the financials, but we do track the ongoing activities of the kids who sign up.  One of the Pro teams we visited adopted the philosophy as their primary means of training!

Levi.com’s VP of Marketing, Patrice Varni, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference about Levi.com’s Project 501, Levi’s user submitted design contest. The project was launched using a branded entertainment segment on the television show Project Runway and an online campaign targeted to women. Digital Podcast covered the launch of the program and asked the question about whether this kind of campaign, done on Levi’s site, could drive a big enough audience to make the investment worthwhile.

Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely disconnected. Someone had arranged for the branded entertainment piece on the Project Runway show and as a part of that got a large online buy on the Bravo site.

The project landed in Patrice’s lap and she went to Avenue A/Razorfish and had them develop an online campaign oriented around a very detailed map of all the touch points. Once they had completed the map, they went back through the map and made sure that they incorporated selling pants into the program in a way that featured the right products.

They got 3,000 design submissions to the contest for designing a new Levi’s product. Over 2000 of the submissions complied with the rules. The campaign got 134,000 unique visitors and almost 19,000 registered users. Two-thirds of those were women in target age group of 18 to 25 years old. They had 122,000 design ratings. They also got 924 social networking/blog badges with over 30,000 views.

Interestingly word of mouth marketing on social media like blogs and social networks turned out to be a major driver of awareness about the campaign. Social media drove 38% of the awareness about the campaign as compared to 30% of awareness coming from TV and low single digit for everything else.

During the five weeks that the program was running, the top 5 selling products changed from traditional products to the featured products. The traditional core products had a price point of about 44 dollars and sold to an older demographic. The products featured in the campaign were Levi store exclusive, more fashion forward and had price range of 58 to 70 dollars. Literally overnight they got a different demographic and a sales lift that made a measurable impact on sales.

Once the campaign ended, the top 5 selling products switched back to the traditional top 5 selling products.

Patrice said that they had to steal themselves to the loss of control and reaction during the program. Once they had chosen a winner, they had some very negative comments from people who didn’t win. This caused some consternation about the comments and debate about what to do about the comments. Levi decided to leave the comments up and it turned out well as the community policed the problem well.

Perhaps the most important part of the program was the way the program changed the way the company worked to get the digital team working with the marketing team. The online and traditional agencies had to work together to make this work.

While the results may not seem tremendous, Patrice felt that the program was a tremendous success, due to the organizational learning and the level of engagement.

It is very interesting to see Levi’s willingness to experiment and the results of this program. Project 501 clearly provided some hands on learning and capability building for Levi. It is clear that this kind of program can drive sales. The challenge now becomes how how to scale this type of program into a more significant campaign and how to make it more than a five week program.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, case study, Levi

Nancy MacIntyre, LeapFrog’s Executive Vice President for Product, Innovation and Marketing, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference. Nancy introduced a new integrated service called Learning Path. The service focuses on personalized learning by integrating an online site with toys so that learning can be planned and tracked.

She calls it an “educational GPS” and a CRM for LeapFrog.

The service, which is planned to launch this summer, focuses on 8-13 year olds.

Learning Path automatically collects data from devices and produces reports that get emailed to the parents. It allows the parent to see first hand what the kid has been doing, how engaged they are, where they are on the Learning Path and what LeapFrog product should be next.

LeapFrog is increasing its investment into the LeapFrog website. They now have an educational content advisory board and are working on building community aspects into the site. They are also working on how to mobilize the millions of moms out there who love LeapFrog. They want to increase the strength of connection between the moms and their children by giving them information about how the child’s learning is progressing.

Nancy was asked about what LeapFrog is doing about the kids graduating from LeapFrog to Nintendo and she described their new Didj product as their competitive offering. (Editors note: Seems like Nintendo and LeapFrog should merge. It would be a good fit.)

Nancy was asked about multi-player games and she said that they have a secret product called Maestro that will be a multi-player product for kids and will launch next year.

Technorati Tags: LeapFrog, Learning Path, Forrester

In Digital Podcast 46, we interview Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing for Oglivy’s 360 Digital Influence group, about his new book, Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back.

The book is about why brands need to have a personality, how to avoid being faceless and finding a way to add more authenticity into marketing.

Rohit describes to us how he came to write the book and what he wanted to accomplish. He describes what he means by personality and provides some concrete, actionable suggestions for how to use his ideas in your marketing work.

 

 Digital Podcast 46 [35:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1293)

He argues that personality must be unique, authentic and talkable. We explore what he means by talkable and in the process he reveals a secret about the book that readers will want to know. To hear the secret you will have to listen to the podcast. Pay attention around the half-way point to hear the details.

Rohit also goes into detail about how he is using the ideas in his book to market the book. The ideas he shares are valuable for everyone with something to market. If you’re a CEO who wants to make your marketing more effective, a marketing manager who wants to make a difference, a blogger/podcaster who wants to grow your audience then the ideas and suggestions Rohit makes are worth paying attention too.

Remember be unique, be authentic, be talkable.

You can find out more about Rohit at Influential Marketing Blog and at the book’s web site at PersonalityNotIncluded.com.

You can buy the book at Amazon (affiliate link).

Technorati Tags: Rohit Bhargava, Personality Not Included

Kobe Bryant recently released a video of himself jumping over a speeding car, or at least appearing to jump over a speeding car. While the video is likely some special effect, the stunt is incredibly stupid and irresponsible. He starts the video by showing off his new Nike’s which makes me believe that this is part of some kind of ad campaign.

The video has been shown on numerous news shows this morning and will undoubtedly get sent around until everyone has seen it.

The problem will come when the first stupid person decides to try it themselves to show off. The first broken neck, paralyzed or dead kid will make Kobe and Nike look incredibly irresponsible. I would not be surprised if they get sued and it becomes a big mess.

While I don’t want to sound like the grumpy parent that I am, I can’t help but point out that this is stupid and irresponsible behavior and the perhaps the dark side of social media marketing. Kobe has a huge following despite his problems off the court. Kobe’s jersey is the number one most popular jersey in the US and even in China. Kids who don’t know any better and adults who are stupid enough to try to emulate their heroes are going to see if they can do this too.

While a pair of Nike’s costs $130 bucks, a kid’s life priceless. Nike and Kobe should start thinking now about how they get themselves out of that mess. It’s coming soon.

Technorati Tags: Kobe Bryant, Nike, social responsibility, social media marketing

I came up with a short starter list of why Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Communications Officers should make social media a priority.

You need to know what people are saying about you. There is a customer to customer and press to customer conversation going on throughout the internet. Any company that fails to understand and act on this puts themselves at risk for getting blindsided by the conversation. At a minimum, they should be tracking the conversation. The best practice is to go beyond monitoring to building a social media strategy to influence the conversation.

You need to know what your people are saying. If your customers are using social media, it’s also quite likely that your employees are using social media. They will be doing it no only for themselves, but also to fill gaps in the company’s social media strategy. Left un-managed, this presents numerous risks to the company’s reputation and customer/competitive relations. Inappropriate information may get disclosed and comments about policies by employees may confuse customers. Further, it is not uncommon for information published by employees with good intentions to be poorly maintained and out of date. Every company should have a Social Media Policy and a plan for cleaning up/maintaining information published about them across the internet.

You need to make your marketing/communications more efficient. Customer and stakeholder attention is now in shorter supply than ever. Traditional marketing and communications approaches are becoming increasingly less effective and consequently it’s becoming more expensive to realize communication goals. Social media and community are two mechanisms to radically improve efficiency. It will take an investment, but this investment has much greater leverage than investments in traditional media. Traditional media content scales up linearly with cost and have diminishing returns. Social media content scales up with the size of the community and can have compounding returns. Any cost conscious CMO or CCO should be figuring out how to use these tools to make their companies more cost effective.

Tell us why you think CMOs and CCOs should make social media like blogging, podcasting and networking a priority.

PS - Click here to learn more about how the University of Southern California’s CCO is using social media by listening to this Digital Podcast.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, marketing priorities

Social media can be a very effective mechanism for marketing as shown in this video case study produced by Shel Israel as part of FastCompany.tv. The campaign was put together by SeaWorld San Antonio and focused on a pre-launch campaign for a new ride at the park called Journey to Atlantis.

They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out.

This is an excellent example of a simple, highly focused campaign and a well orchestrated effort to measure the results.

This type of campaign shows that social media can be woven into your marketing efforts with practical and relatively straightforward methods. I’ve captured some screen shots below and a sample of a YouTube video to help provide some perspective on the project.

Here’s what the blog looked like:

And a video from YouTube.

And some of pictures from Flickr.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media marketing, FastCompany.tv, SeaWorld, Journey to Atlantis, Shel Israel

Justin Smith (Product Manager, Watercooler), Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Blake Commagere (Mogad.com), David Gentzel (SocialMedia), Jia Shen (RockYou) spoke on a panel today about designing viral applications.

Andrew started the conversation by describing viral marketing as a marketing system where your customers sell your next generation of customers. Jia pointed out that the time frame now has been collapsed by the social networks so there is an accelerated viral opportunity.

There’s been a long evolution of viral from word of mouth, through email and other tools that have been turned into features of the social networks. Now instead of starting with the product, you can start from the customer and work back through the social networks as distribution channels.

Jai pointed out that early on Facebook did not put much restraint on how many invitations could be sent which created a gold rush effect that allowed an eco-system to grow as developers chased the growth. Now Facebook has put constraints on viral marketing tools which will make it much harder for new players to grow. The newer APIs are also being more conservative and that means they may have more difficulty building the same kind of ecosystem.

The differences in functionality across sites drives difference in application strategy. For example, on MySpace the focus will be more on applications that are self-expression, canvas oriented and less the viral, messaging applications.

Andrew highlighted that you can learn a lot from games in helping to make applications more successful. Things like reward schedules can drive use.

If you can build something that catches on you will know after the first couple of thousand users. If it’s successful with this group you can be confident that you can grow the applications penetration. Less viral applications will take marketing money to grow.

Being viral is not all it takes. If you’re getting lots of visitors and trials, and are not converting them into active users you are missing the opportunity. You need to make sure you’re measuring retention and repeat use of different visitor cohorts to ensure long term success.

It takes both viral growth and engagement to be successful.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, viral applications, viral marketing

Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. He is talking about how MySpace looks at it’s developer platform and how it fits into their business model.

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy - sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad - the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon - imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? - Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology - points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace