How a strategic mission can fuel the next historic move in marketing and PR.
By Robert Wheatley
Most of us have experienced a point in our careers when the stars aligned as our PR campaigns and marketing programs achieved dramatic perhaps even monumental results. A moment in time when we almost can’t believe what we’ve just witnessed in business growth, consumer buzz, perhaps major media attention — or to leap-frog a much bigger competitor with a better idea the world says yes to.
Life’s achievements, career or otherwise, are to be savored — and we hope dearly, to be repeated. No one-hit-wonder here. Nope, not a one-trick pony, right? We always say this under our breath with a slight tinge of trepidation that maybe the big outcome will be hard to come by a second or third time. So we push ahead eager that some of the magic and creative lightening will strike twice and hit the results jackpot again. Dumb luck you think? No….
So what is the grist of this success made of these days? Is there a consistent theme within these experiences and projects that metaphorically or mathematically blew the doors off? It is highly probable they were big bets representing a strategic swing for the fence. Some risk capital, personal and otherwise, was expended. Let’s explore some evolutions in the current path to remarkable marketing achievement….
Finding Your Mission…
Lately we’re seeing some organizations up the ante and scope of their marketing and outreach efforts by enveloping their brands in an initiative that draws from a more cinematic scope and mission.
Take ConAgra’s recent announcement of a multi-brand campaign entitled Child Hunger Ends Here. No small cause and one that resonates with moms everywhere who understand and appreciate the plight of less fortunate children. The project unites a portfolio of their packaged foods brands under a single banner.
Or Pepsico’s massive “Refresh Project” – an initiative that falls from the company’s efforts to emphasize social values while working to embed greater meaning into their brands and businesses. Refresh invites investment proposals from all comers at the local level for arts, music, community and education projects.
And the comprehensive, “Live Music Series” lifestyle program from Jim Beam bourbon that helps unlock the social connections inherent in their business category. Beam is sponsoring and presenting an array of music events, offers and experiences. What resonates here is the commitment to relevance with their core target audience’s lifestyle passions and aspirations.
By definition we’re wading into territory populated with larger-in-scope, transformative projects that carry with them the potential to impact brand and business behavior. And in doing so fulfill the definition of what we would call a “BIG” idea: bigger in agenda, bigger in reach, bigger in ambition and hopefully attached also to bigger outcomes and long-term benefits.
Efforts in this vein surely will work harder to break through the rust of rampant, epidemic indifference that exists virtually everywhere. Sounds good, but what’s the path look like? Let’s examine five key elements that together bring some magic to the table when working to elevate the brand’s mission and meaning to a higher level:
1. A historic sense of gravitas, mattering and purpose – consumer behaviorists tell us that people want to be a part of something bigger than themselves (And so by the way do employees, too). Projects that spring from a foundation of greater meaning, value and symbolism in turn infuse the business with superior significance and worth. There’s just a richer conversation to be had than the year-to-year rework of product feature and benefit messaging
2. Momentum to ante-up a clutter-busting focus of resources (not tonnage in spend but in cross-channel deployment) – more horsepower is secured when the concept also waves the flag of moral imperative or corporate calling. The aggregation of assets on a single platform creates potential homerun clout. Much needed in a marketing environment already riven with attention deficits and loss of grip in conventional media channels
3. The concept is drenched with inherent merit, married to simplicity – and thus it immediately gains power and demands attention. Said another way the intellectual space a brand can expect to own exists in direct proportion to its meaning and value to the consumer. Projects of larger scope won’t work successfully if burdened by too many agendas or alternative messaging priorities all competing for brain time. Instead the simple thrust of hunger, community betterment and music are liberating in their ability to finally get somewhere with a human who invests very little mental territory with any one idea before moving on
4. Relentless devotion to consumer insight – These platforms all spring from understanding consumer aspirations, values and passions. Hunger, what gives? It’s the common thread of value and importance moms place on their primary role as caretaker of their children’s welfare. This is an over-arching common trait and mission within moms’ understanding of what matters. Matching the brand agenda to this prevailing behavior embraces the emotional ties so important in building brand relationships
5. Corporate reputation and brand reputation no longer separated – both are intertwined. Consumers watch and observe businesses to see if actions match words. Are an organization’s beliefs and values of equal priority with the demands of commerce and balance sheets? You are making a statement about what you believe in, what is important as a business and as a brand. A strategic mission creates an internal and external flagpole all stakeholders can rally around and salute. In doing so the faceless corporation gets an endearing face and the business results can benefit from this humanizing experience
Yes there’s a process required to correctly sync an organization’s DNA, values and understanding of the consumer’s lifestyle priorities with a mission that makes sense. But in equal measure it requires one other thing to make this “jackpot” moment recur. Fearlessness.
Go for it. Life is short and no great thing is accomplished by staying in the comfort zone.
There’s been a fair amount of marketing media buzz of late about the recent promotion from Kellogg called Share Your Breakfast. It asks consumers to share a photo of their breakfast – and with each post a donation is triggered towards a morning meal for children who have trouble getting the right nutritional start on their day. Just brilliant. By all accounts to date it’s successful, too.
Sure it’s relevant to moms and their concerns plus the message is simple, therefore sticky and compelling. But what’s really going on here? Below is a statement we’ve included in a few client and new business presentations that sums it up:
“Science now proves what brand strategists have always sensed. We human beings have a need to believe in and act upon something that’s greater than ourselves… Let’s realize the significance of this discovery and impress upon ourselves that a brand is a belief system. Want greater rewards? Then impart your brand with greater meaning…”
One of the poster child examples of this might be TOMS Shoes, a business designed from the ground up to embody this idea. In their unique case, the company gives away a pair of shoes to needy children in foreign countries for every pair they sell. One-to-one is how it’s described. And the company recently announced plans to take this concept to the next level – which we’ll assume for now will be some expanded foray into new product categories with the same premise its core.
Have You Found Your Higher Purpose?
The concept of finding a brand’s higher purpose isn’t just an articulation of cause marketing strategies. It could be some other element of passion within a target consumer’s lifestyle that your brand can help enable.
Our point about this concept of higher purpose though, is not so much recommending an “add on” project to the annual marketing plan. We see it as fundamental to relationship creation between brand and user. If you are willing to consider it that way, then higher purpose is part of the fabric of successful brand building in the age of consumer control.
A Key to Powerful PR…
Moreover this kind of thinking delivers the grist for powerful public relations and social media programs. It can take a campaign to another level once you’ve discovered through insight research what your consumer’s truly care about. Imagine if you will the compelling voice a brand can secure as advisor and partner in helping consumers do what they love to do. Everyone has a passion for something. It’s in how you position the brand as a “friend” to be helpful and supportive that the magic can happen. That’s often in the form of transformational ideas that imbue your brand with greater meaning and in doing so greater value.
To be sure that value can be found in the dynamically different and laudable efforts of companies like TOMS Shoes — where helping others is baked into the business model. I for one look at that with deep respect and admiration. It’s unselfishness at its apex, and as it turns out a great business too.
The word “remarkable” now transformed for the digital age…
By Robert Wheatley
Yes, there was a time – way back when in the very early years of my career that I succumbed to an age old maneuver popularized by the likes of P.T.Barnum — and others way before me who discovered the media magic of a stunt.
I built the tallest cake in the world. At least it was the tallest then at 36-feet and weighing in at well over a 1,000 pounds. Why you ask? My client, a local independent TV station in the Seattle area had just completed a new broadcast tower that would be the highest man-made thing in the city. How to gin up some clutter busting awareness for something so benign as a massive pile of steel tubes? Sure it would radically improve the broadcast signal thus reception for this channel (stop laughing already — I know this sounds reminiscent of rabbit ears), but, yawn, it just didn’t feel like it would be rewarded with more than a mention here and there.
What to do? Wait I know, let’s build the tallest cake in the world in a popular shopping mall and sell pieces of it for charity! How cake got into the mix in my head I don’t quite remember but baked goods were always a favorite of mine. Perhaps the best move of all was the Associated Press photographer I had hired who got the perfect vertical moment-in-time photo: a large crowd gathered around TV news cameras pointed upwards to the ceiling just as the baker — standing on a giant lift – leaned over to place the last layer of cake that topped the world record. It was media magic around the globe – the remarkable photo and story ran everywhere…west coast, east coast and beyond.
Remarkable then not so remarkable now…
So this cake gambit brought added value in the era of push marketing communication when businesses were at the top of the heap in controlling the flow of news and information outward. Now we’ve seen it all, been there and done that. Shock and awe from around the world sits in our hands via smart phones. Thus the sheer novelty of really tall cakes seems quaint and underwhelming like the 4th of July farm tractor parade in a rural town.
We’ve dialed out the noise, disconnected ourselves from irrelevant stuff, put a hold on what’s coming at us as we self-select only the media channels that most reflect our personal interests and passions. We’re in the era of “me.”
Today remarkable means a brand and business has found a way to connect with us directly – as if in a personal conversation that’s about our self-interests not their own. We are amazed when businesses seem to know us personally and understand our needs. And even more surprised when the effort includes tangible acts of unselfishness and dare we say “friendship” behaviors that transcend the traditional “sell-buy” dynamic that pervades the old transactional style of marketing.
No what’s remarkable now has evolved. Not about stunts, cakes, shotgun media hits and PR by the pound. Today best practices aren’t found solely through the lens of a TV news camera trained on a larger-then-life stunt. We gain more ground now through intimate connections and relationship building. It’s tougher, requires more patience, more strategy, more effort and more insight than a Guinness record-breaking cake will ever serve up.
What do you think?
(The cake tasted great and editors ate it up, literally – ok, I’ll stop here)
Data recently published in a study conducted by digital agency Razorfish confirms that when it comes to engagement between brand and consumers, the popular channels of choice begin with the tried and true.
The top-two picks by consumers in order of importance not surprisingly are email and company web sites. Why? History, longevity, experience and therefore trust.
This doesn’t mean that other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are unimportant. It just means that they are still emerging channels where the consumer experience is still in its “training wheels” phase.
The eminence of trust…
This information telecasts once again what is the preeminent insight about interacting with consumers in the age of consumer control: it’s trust. Trust in the channel. Trust in its use and value. Trust in how the interaction takes place. Trust that comes by way of our understanding and sense of control over the conditions in which we interact.
What’s important here perhaps is this over-arching issue and our ability to get focused on it. Thus how does one maximize trust?
Here are some trust-optimizing tips:
1. Don’t push — sales messages, rather inform, educate and entertain
2. Build an environment that invites conversation and feedback. We have more trust intrinsically with those we believe want to listen and understand our needs and concerns
3. Borrow equity from outside influencers and experts. I’m not downplaying the value of celebrities for example. But I do believe we’ve entered the era of experts. And in doing so have come to understand that it is the outside third parties who have credibility in a subject area that we listen to the most. Outside experts can validate what we claim about our product, service or experience
4. Adopt the style of reporters. Editorial content creators in the old-media age acquired audiences by becoming a reliable source of useful, interesting and valuable ideas and information. The reporter’s style is to present information factually and with a nod towards validating what’s being said with respected sources. This rings with more value than blatant promotion, which often comes across as self-serving
5. Look for trust-breakers. Within the platforms we know consumers prefer such as opt-in email and web sites, are there areas in your content or how consumers are invited to interact that impede trust? Are there policies, procedures and process that can be interpreted as either unfriendly or self-serving. Think about it and perform a “trust audit” to assess the consumer experience holistically
6. And the king of all trust-makers: unselfishness. Imagine caring enough about your core consumer that you work hard to understand their passion and interests, and then actually work to help them enjoy and experience those very same things? What if you emphasized and invested in being helpful and supportive, before you look at the sales transaction side of the relationship?
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but trust really takes root when your audience believes you actually care about them and their welfare. And caring is made real by doing – through tangible demonstration.
Oh my, what have we done here? We’ve actually landed on the structural pillar of sound public relations strategy. What is PR supposed to do in helping you build your brand? Identify those avenues and mediums for you to demonstrate and prove what you assert to be true about your mission, values, product and expertise. To develop an environment of trust and belief.
We’ve come full circle. Trust gets you through the whole concept of successful brand engagement doesn’t it?
In our last post we talked about five ways to become a credible source of brand-owned media (content creation). Foremost in that discussion was an important point: how to become a TRUSTED, and therefore valued, source.
An article today at Marketing Daily stresses the point about credibility. Why does this matter?
There are so many voices, so many places to get information the consumer is now in search of what is reliable, bankable, believe-able in the midst of all this noise. Recent studies show an increase in consumer preference for traditional media sources like newspapers because of the trust factor. There’s still an underlying sense that professional media organizations continue to employ highly trained staff and have ethical standards that require them to fully verify a story’s assertions and details before publishing.
Nonetheless, we are at an important inflexion point in media where brands can affordably become a source of content themselves. It’s transformational. And while this is both inevitable and unstop-able in the scheme of things, it’s also vital we understand the consumer’s underlying needs and concerns as this marketing communications picture continues to evolve.
Validate, corroborate and prove the assertions brands make…
What do consumers want? They want validation of what’s being said from sources they trust and respect. You’re saying yeah, but isn’t the “real person like me” supposed to be the nexus of validation? That’s changing. In the midst of so much media content, thought and opinion – consumers are looking for voices they believe to make sense of it all and provide guidance.
Outside influencers, experts and credentialed knowledge brokers facilitate this desire for validation. Brands proclaiming their expertise in a subject area is one thing, following the same rules professional media organizations employ to verify assertions through expert quote-able sources is entirely another.
o This is how we make it true, real, credible for the consumer. We in effect borrow equity from the third parties who have established their own credibility in a subject area relevant to our business.
Content creation is not merely an option for brands these days. It’s vital and important as the media landscape continues to evolve from “talking at” people to conversation. How you go about doing it will spell the difference between success and discovering you have no audience because trust has not taken root.
One of the greatest marketing evolutions in the Internet era: brands have acquired the ability to be content creators – publishers, producers of their own media. This fits perfectly with the other great strategic upheaval — brands can no longer simply imprint messages and attempt to exert “control” over consumer behavior by pushing messages at consumers.
As I write this, many brands still believe this will work.
The brand/consumer relationship is tougher to build now and demands a more selfless form of engagement. It requires singular devotion to understanding and mining relevance to the consumer’s lifestyle interests and passions. Brands-that-matter to their users can earn permission for a relationship by connecting tangibly, emotionally to activities and interests their consumer already cares about.
So doesn’t it stand to reason that working hard to become a source of valuable, interesting, engaging, entertaining information about these lifestyle passions could be important? For a fashion or jewelry brand it’s the opportunity to tap into that creative self-expression that is at the core of what drives a fashion-focused person. For the food brand it might be enabling the culinary creativity, learning and emotional payoff going on everyday in the kitchen (experimenting with new dishes, tastes and techniques).
In virtually every category insight research can help you unearth this unique emotional grist that drives the most devoted fans and followers. And from there is an enormously powerful opportunity to cement that relationship by casting the brand as an enabler and provider of stories and content that offers intrinsic value – How? Information, ideas and experiences that help the consumer enjoy, do what they do better and connect with others that share their interests.
Trust is the key to engagement…
But the word trust looms large in this. How does a brand successfully establish itself as a trusted and valued source? Here are five ways a brand can develop a respected and reliable channel of rich-content media:
1. The value of respected outside voices
In the news business, outside quote-able sources are employed to validate assertions made in a news story. Similarly, outside experts, influencers and knowledge-brokers can bring their own credibility and cachet to the story telling in brand-owned media. Bring in the experts as contributors and steer clear of putting them in a compromised position of endorsing or directly selling your product.
2. The type, tone and tenor of the content matters
Watch the overt selling. Your media mission is to be helpful, useful. Think like a magazine editor or TV producer working to build exciting, interesting stories that add value to the reader’s lifestyle. Operate like a traditional media organization focused on reader and viewer benefit. Take a reportorial approach to the content. If the communication comes off like reporting and informing rather than persuading, you’ll earn the attention of your best followers.
3. Identify the storytellers
Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.
Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.
4. Transparency
How do real friends speak with each other? Honest, straightforward, real, open communication is fundamental between true friends. Treat your audience with the same respect. When issues and complaints arise, don’t hide or spin. Be matter-of-fact. Admit mistakes – probably the hardest thing to do, but also the most refreshing and endearing behavior you can show. Nobody’s perfect. No one expects your organization or brand to be perfect.
5. Be entertaining
You can’t bore your customer’s into loving you and coming back for more. Valuable, useful information is a prerequisite. How that information is served up can vary from tedious to fun and interesting. Make them laugh and make them cry. Video may be the most powerful medium available and offers the magic of words, picture, sound, music, personalities and color. It’s a bite-size world we live in now so keep it short. But most of all keep it entertaining. Mainstream media is working overtime to achieve this and so should you.
What’s the end game? Once a respected source, you have an open channel of communication that’s direct. And with content that’s got their attention – a long way from the good old days of beating people over the head with repetition and self-serving messages you hope and pray will break through the noise. Ten years ago brands could only dream of creating such a relationship. Now it’s possible.
You know what’s great about powerful ideas? You can recognize the strengths almost instantly. And yesterday that happened at ragan.com’s review of Whirlpool’s web content strategy. So today we’re applauding and recognizing some terrific work in PR and brand building. As we’ve said before here at the Brand Trailblazer blog, if you look at your best consumers as walking wallets and view the relationship with them as transactional, you are risking failure in your ability to engage and communicate effectively.
On the other hand, treating consumer relationships the same way we regard our closest friends and family (we truly care about them) opens the door to an entirely new spectrum of programs and strategies — aimed at building relevance for your brand in the lives of those you hope to sell to. We call this finding and mining your brand’s “Higher Purpose”.
Whirlpool offers us a terrific example of this kind of thinking, well executed, that demonstrates a profound understanding of how brand relationships are built in the era of consumer control. Whirlpool has created the Institute for Fabric Science and Institute for Kitchen Science as platforms intended to help, advise and engage consumers on problems and needs they may have in their daily lives around cooking, cleaning (appliances) and laundry.
This works to establish Whirlpool as an expert knowledge broker and advisor on issues the consumer faces. Further real people are involved in the content creation and delivery, which helps humanize the brand. It takes about a second to see the vast array of potential extensions these platforms offer for earned media activity and additional multi-media content creation, so vital to aggregating and activating an audience at Facebook.
Monica Teague, Whirlpool’s Senior Manager for PR and Brand Experience had this to say in her Ragan.com interview: “And that’s the whole point of the Institute of Fabric Science and its sister, the Institute of Kitchen Science. Acting as a resource—versus promoting products—goes a long way in developing brand loyalty.” Amen to that. And we would go a step further to point out that now brands are obligated to earn permission for a relationship with consumers based on their ability to authentically connect with lifestyle needs and aspirations. It’s this kind of thinking that helps forge real bonds with people over time.
In the absence of strategies like the Whirpool effort, brands risk disengagement and commoditization – where finding a lower price becomes the only emotional value consumers experience with your business.
From editorial shotgun to building influence and engagement
By Robert Wheatley
There may have been a time when massive distributions of press releases or video and audio news releases would have been the principal component in mainstream consumer media PR plans. Those days are gone.
Have you fully made the strategic and tactical shift to focus on a different view of engagement and communications? Do conversations and relationships sit at the forefront of your campaigns, more so than looking for gross impressions and measurement yardsticks based purely on audience number delivery?
Is Internet based communication, outreach and community building getting the budget priority or is mainstream media still grabbing the spending spotlight?
At a recent meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, Coca-Cola CMO Joe Tripodi was quoted in coverage of the event saying that conversations are now more important than impressions. To be sure effective message delivery has always been a vital consideration – nonetheless mass or “tonnage” of placements was also a major part of the editorial results story.
Think Different…
• We are now participating in the era of relationship-based marketing.
• Where influence is earned based on the brand’s ability to mine relevance with the target consumer’s lifestyle.
• And true communication is a not only an outcome of optimizing the intersection of earned media and owned content, but also developing and investing in conversational tools. The crux of this effort is more peer-to-peer than loading the communications shotgun for another outward facing message blast.
Quality of contact is important and quality builds from a base of reciprocity. How do you know if your thinking is right on this score? Ask yourself this question: am I actively looking for ways that my brand can act and operate to improve my best customer’s lifestyle and enable/facilitate their personal interests?
Pay-to-Play
Even mainstream media channels are in a state of transition as audience stats once employed to lure in advertisers gets thinned by the splintering of consumer attention — mostly to places where opt-in engagement work well because the content to consume is not about overt selling. That said, increasingly the lines between editorial (church) and paid (state) are blurring. Just as computers and TV are merging into one platform so is the ability to purchase alignment of a brand message within the content side of media — digital, print and broadcast.
This is tricky because a fine line exists here between useful, valuable, helpful messaging and something less than that. Nevertheless we can expect to see more of this ahead.
The Future…
Editorial media outreach is and will remain a relevant and significant part of the PR value proposition. That said, the strategic approach has changed from big distribution plays to focus on customization, relationship development, unique angles, exclusives and narrowcasting. And operating in parallel to earned media is a growing layer of direct forms of communication (and conversation in social platforms) where quality will forever outweigh quantity as the principle driver of effectiveness.
PR experts are content creators now in opt-in channels where relevance spells the difference between aggregating an audience of followers — or not. More strategy is required. More focus. More understanding of consumer desires and passions. More targeted, interactive media activity.
Aside from any social, moral or environmental priorities, your primary goal in business is…. to sell more products, more often at better prices. Success often assumes you have a relevant brand in a healthy category with the right value proposition. But wait, how brands connect with consumers is in a state of change.
Now we learn the consequence of our whipsaw economic environment is a thorough re-evaluation of what matters, what people care about. Gone are the remaining vestiges of consumption for its own sake and consumer’s defining themselves and their lives on the basis of the products they acquire.
In its place comes a soulful desire for greater life meaning. A refined sense of purpose. A drive for community and social engagement.
• Are you witnessing this change?
• How will this impact how you position your brand?
• How you go to market?
• What should your brand’s message be about?
• What tools you should use to reach out?
Please share your views and opinions. You agree, disagree? Why?
A backwards glance shows seismic shift in the PR world
By Robert Wheatley
It was without a doubt one of the most powerful PR campaigns I’ve ever been associated with. An entirely new product category created from scratch off a compelling, dynamic public relations strategy. Yes, I said PR — not advertising or sales promotion. Over $100 million in sales (and that’s in 1994 dollars) was achieved and an 84% share of market within 16 months of launch. It was the introduction of First Alert brand carbon monoxide alarm products.
Recently we heard from the Wall Street Journal that futurist Richard Dawson believes newspapers will be irrelevant by 2022. The reference point for this incredible shift can be more fully appreciated by briefly looking backwards to a moment in time when conventional print and broadcast media were popular and respected sources of news, information and influence on consumer behavior and public opinion.
Here’s the story of PR campaign media strategies that were built from a full-scale deployment of earned media tactics.
• And the approach is no longer as relevant. New businesses are now developed in an interactive, narrowcast environment without push-button scale-ability
The lesson: the old rules no longer apply. New media protocols, planning processes and program strategies literally demand a transformation of our beliefs about brand building, PR strategies, how PR firms are put together. Thus how we look at messaging, outreach, measurement and evaluation of ideas is different than it was even 10 years ago.
When editorial media ruled!!
It was 1993, the firm I owned at the time, Wheatley Blair, was hired by First Alert, the leading home safety products brand in the US. They had invented the residential smoke alarm category and literally owned the retail market for them. Rich Timmons, now principal and President of Wheatley & Timmons, was the global marketing chief at First Alert – a marketer who had followed conventional paths focused on TV advertising and who was going to do something unprecedented: launch the next biggest thing to come along in his company’s history through PR.
A new category: Carbon Monoxide (CO) Alarms
We were awestruck the moment we learned that CO poisoning was the largest source of accidental poisoning deaths in America.
First Alert had created the first affordable residential detector for this previously unseen and little understood hazard that claimed at least 1,500 lives every year and injured thousands more.
The Silent Killer
How do you convince Americans to protect themselves from a hazard you cannot see, taste, smell or touch? And after all, headaches are common and ubiquitous, right? We created a theme that dramatically defined the threat.
• Poison center physicians, indoor air quality experts, leading fire service officials and others were recruited to help explain the problem and support the solution
• We built the Carbon Monoxide Information Bureau to house the scientific and medical evidence
• Brought together consumers who had lost loved ones in CO accidents to personalize and make the hazard tangible and real
Launching a Media Tsunami
Media tours were conducted with CO survivors and coordinated with local fire department representatives. We booked medical expert appearances on TODAY, Good Morning America and all of the network news programs. Placed in-depth hazard education features in national newspapers and virtually every major daily in the US. Similar treatments on family protection were secured in women’s service, lifestyle and DIY magazines. We assembled an in-house TV news production department that was producing a regular flow of 90-second video news packages.
Our tracking on consumer media impressions within six months topped 700 million and grew to over a billion. There were 6 o’clock news stories in major markets about lines outside stores exclaiming that First Alert alarm products were sold out. A major trade publication featured a quote from a senior buyer at Walmart who described First Alert CO alarms as the “cabbage patch doll of the hardware department.”
A business was created. A category established. First Alert doubled in size. Thousands of lives were saved in the process. Importantly, editorial media in virtually all channels was the instrument of awareness, education and motivation. The decline of traction, audiences and the splintering of media into hundreds if not thousands of platforms of self-interest make this story simply a reflection of a another age in media communication.
The same product launch, repeated today would be wholly different and geared to empower individuals to spread the word as much as media properties are addressed to influence the influencers.
For First Alert we constructed a media machine that hummed and produced and delivered editorial attention. That is no longer the way communication operates. Yet many still attempt to apply the old rules of quantity thresholds to a world now devoted to the quality and personalization of encounters with communication.
Nine years after we began, the agency moved on to represent Kidde, the other leading category brand. We helped them secure the number one market share position. This dramatic video PSA was part of the effort:
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