Updates from Chris RSS

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  Chris 9:30 am on October 29, 2012 Permalink  

  Bringing a Fresh Idea Forward 

  I have heard ad people say that it’s either the most terrifying or the most exhilarating time to be in our business. Being an eternal optimist, I side with the latter.

  No other time has afforded our industry the opportunity to devise solutions for our clients with a virtual endless choice of technology, platforms and possibilities to help us engage with an audience.

  One recent success story for us is The Pike Place Market Farm Fresh Lunches. Farm Season is the most important time of year for Pike Place: the bounty’s aplenty and the tourists a-many. But the Market faces a challenge in convincing Seattleites that the Market is theirs—given “fresh” local farmers markets’ popularity in many neighborhoods—and to shop it regularly.

  And, Pike Place is a quasi-governmental organization with understandably tight budgets. In the past, the Market had run paid media at the level they could afford to a buckshot audience prompting Seattleites to get over the parking burden and crowds to shop during Farm Season. Our client challenged us to approach it a different way.

  First, we shrank the audience. Shrink the audience? Well, yes, the qualified audience. Instead of reaching out broadly, we focused on those whom realistically would decide to shop the Market more often: people who live or work downtown. So, we came up with the idea of a downtown lunch series to interrupt the daily grind of Seattleites and remind them of the Market’s proximity and value.

  Partnering with favorite Market eateries—Tom Douglas, Matt’s in the Market, Steelhead Diner and Marché, we hosted five summer Wednesday pop-up restaurants. Each $5 lunch offering was created with farm fresh ingredients from the Market and took place in select worker hub locations that we staged with picnic tables and bright Market flower bouquet centerpieces. We handed out branded reusable shopping bags (you know about the bag ban in Seattle?) with coupons inside to drive Seattleites back to the Market.

  We served about 1,000 of these fun, delicious brand experiences, bringing the Market to attendees. In response, they’ve shopped: coupon redemption back to Market farm tables has been strong. The message also was amplified through participants’ Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and we attracted influencers like Marcus Samuelson of Top Chef Masters fame who tweeted and blogged about the program.

  Just one example of a right-sized, innovative solution to a business challenge from a great client. Now that’s exhilarating. See? Told you so.
   
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  Chris 10:25 pm on October 10, 2011 Permalink  

  C+F’s Top Five Baseball Movies 

  With all the hullaballoo around Moneyball, we at C+F took a moment to ponder our favorite baseball movies. As the longtime agency for the Seattle Mariners, we know a little something about baseball entertainment. (We gave birth to Larry Bernandez, after all.) So we implemented a detailed survey of popular baseball movies—with several criteria, all with a different numerical weight that was then put into Google-esque algorithm to determine our favorites. Okay, it was basically a straw poll. Regardless, here are our top five favorite baseball movies in order of staff (read: expert) preference:

  1. Major League: A hugely entertaining depiction of an under, then overachieving group of cobbled together Cleveland Indians misfits. The characters of this movie are memorable, from overpaid giant ego Roger Dorn, to tire salesman-turned-skipper Lou Brown, to washed-up and lovesick catcher Jake Taylor. Throw in great performers Wesley Snipes (Willie Mays Hayes), Charlie Sheen (Rick Vaughn) and buffed-up Cuban slugger Dennis Haysbert (Pedro Cerrano) and it’s a movie that you can watch over and over again while reciting all of the great one liners (i.e. “You put snot on the ball?” or “It’s too high.”). We almost dropped this movie down in the rankings on account of the inept sequels Major League II and Major League: Back to the Minors, but the original shines and gets top billing from C+F.
  2. Bull Durham: Kevin Costner is as believable as it gets with his portrayal of Crash Davis—a lifetime minor league catcher who has seen it all and is enduring long bus rides in the Southern League for one last longshot at the “show”. Written by former minor leaguer Ron Shelton, no baseball movie better tells the story of what bush league baseball is all about. Tim Robbins—despite his dubious athleticism—shines as a big ego prospect with an invincibility and sense of entitlement complex. The entire movie is great, but top scenes are Costner’s epic “What I believe in” speech, the interview cliché lesson and Crash Davis waxing longingly about his time in the bags. This would get argument in some circles as the best all-time baseball movie and it was a close call in the C+F survey.
  3. Field of Dreams: 22 years later, this movie can still make any grown man get downright misty. (There is crying in baseball after all. See below.) Playing on the romanticism of baseball, Kevin Costner is present again as an idealistic, unsuccessful Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field in the middle of a prized cornfield because some eerie, yet prophetic voice told him to do so. James Earl Jones is awesome as a J.D. Salinger-like scribe who gets pulled into Costner’s quest and delivers the greatest single speech in any baseball movie ever. Bar none. The movie culminates in Costner having an opportunity to play catch with his estranged ghost of a father, which is about the time we claim dust in the eye or oncoming cold sniffles to cover up the fact that even though we’ve seen this movie 49 times, the poignancy and nostalgia of this baseball story still makes us weepy. The other thing this movie makes you think is: what the hell happened to Ray Liotta?
  4. Sandlot: Baseball nostalgia pulls at us again in this movie about a group of kids growing up in Southern California one summer playing baseball on the neighborhood sandlot. (A casualty of suburbia.) A cast of great child characters makes this movie endearing and James Earl Jones shows up again to provide some real baseball movie cred to the picture. Looking past the ill-casting of Dennis Leary as the intimidating stepfather, this movie is a nice story of how baseball ties diverse people together and how special shoes can help you prevail in any athletic feat. Thanks Benny.
  5. A League of Their Own: What do you get when throw Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna and Tom Hanks into an historical baseball timepiece? Cinematic gold. The story captures the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Baseball League which became popular during WW2 when the country’s men were away at war. Regardless of gender, this movie has genuine baseball chops and the baseball sequences are spot on. Hanks delivers a perfect performance as a washed-up and perpetually inebriated ex-major leaguer who has been tapped to bring validity to the league as a team manager. The girls’ talent and grit turns him from grumpy skeptic to a heartened believer who cagily steers the Peaches into the championship game. If for nothing else this movie cracks our top five for the immortal statement “There’s no crying in baseball”. Or advertising for that matter.

  Once the recency hype dies down, it will be interesting to see where history (or C+F) ends up ranking Moneyball in the pantheon of great baseball movies. Our guess is that it will have staying power and be discussed in the same conversation of the above. Let us know what you think—it’s a great debate.

  Here’s to a hopefully riveting post-season because among other things, We Are Baseball Fans.
   
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  Chris 5:08 pm on September 30, 2011 Permalink  

  Rising up against declining CTRs 

  Over the last couple of years, industry studies have reported a general decrease in average click-through rates (CTR) for online display. This trend was recently highlighted in a Google study looking at CTRs across 2010. The favorability of online display is starting to be questioned given steady declining CTRs and other stats flowing from user studies that find something like 16% of online users account for 80% of all clicks.

  It shouldn’t be a shock to us as marketers (who are consumers ourselves after all) that CTRs are declining. As continually barraged as we are with advertising messages furiously competing for every last nanosecond of our attention, it makes sense that users who are interacting with content they have voluntarily sought-out might not be so ready to be redirected to your site just because you have been gracious enough to place an ad on the page they are viewing. It just doesn’t work that way and we need to rise above the dependence on the click as the only measurement by which we judge campaigns success.

  The focus should move from driving the click to maximizing the impression. We make a lot of impressions in online display, but what is the true quality of those impressions? Not very high if we tell incomplete stories that rely on the click to resolve the narrative. Instead, we should focus on succinct, engaging storytelling in-banner that fully communicates within the unit.
  At C+F (shameless plug) we call this “short-fuse messaging”. The focus should be on strong, yet pithy, complete messages. If your message gets truncated because the user decided not to bless you with the scarce click, then you have not communicated effectively. If the user does click—great and we love that—but it shouldn’t be mandatory to complete the communication, nor the be-all end-all in measurement of success.

  The trick then is to engage in a relevant and meaningful way, maximize the impression and then create paths back to your destination for users to engage with what you have to offer. Paid Search can help. Strong SEO is table stakes. And of course, including online display along with other media in an integrated campaign helps reinforce and drive traffic.
  Site side metrics are still important and driving people to your site to engage them remains key. However, relying solely on an ad click to facilitate this customer experience is dangerous and impractical.

  It presents a challenge to our industry. Account Management must deliver clear strategy for concise storytelling. Creatives must be able to communicate impactful, relevant and complete messages inside ad units. And of course media needs to continue to run communication against a targeted audience in the most relevant environments. We still must learn and optimize continually.

  However, we must evolve the use of online display if we are to continue to recommend this media in our campaigns and ensure we use this medium the best way for the greatest impact on our audiences. If we stay tied to the click, our favorability with our clients will inevitably go by the way of user CTR.