Frame Rate

Before any marketing and advertising project, it’s important to do the research. Find out all that you can about your client and how they do business. Find out all that you can about how they perceive themselves and how they want the public to perceive them. Find out about their short and long-term goals and their overall mission. But most importantly, find out all that you can about your target market.

Yes, it’s important to learn about your client, but it’s more important to learn about your audience. If you put together a great ad, but it doesn’t speak to your audience, then you haven’t accomplished anything. In fact, you might do severe damage to your client’s brand and create a PR nightmare. Consider the online Motrin campaign from last fall that offended so many moms. In the ads, Motrin speaks to the audience from the perspective of a mother — a mother who needs pain relief from carrying her baby in a sling or papoose, or other baby carrier. It sounded good, right? Moms need relief sometimes. However, for moms who actually use and love their baby-carrying devices, the ad completely missed the mark. They found it offensive and insulting and Twitter feeds lit up with posts from moms who have nothing but great things to say about their baby carriers. Motrin may have had a decent idea, but they seem to have fallen way short of connecting with their demographic.

Monday, on Slate.com, writer Seth Stevenson posted an article on reader-nominated bad ads. Head on over, take a look, and see if you agree or disagree with the nominations. Feel free to post your own votes here in the comments section.

For many who are in the public spotlight, the feeling of “any publicity is good publicity” is pretty much the standard. We see this a lot with celebrities whose careers aren’t quite as stellar as they used to be. If Miss Diva-Wanna-Be can’t land a starring role to save her life and her name is disappearing from the headlines, nothing works better than a little trumped up story about checking in to re-hab.

Some claim that Tom Cruise’s proclamation of love for Katie Holmes back in 2005 was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get more people to see their new movies, Batman Begins and War of the Worlds. The announcement was very close to the release dates of both films, and the news kept their names in the headlines.

More recently we’ve seen this with Britney Spears who seems to have buzzed the cuckoo’s nest one time too many and has now crash landed right into it. With the pictures of her exposing everything below the equator, to the irresponsible party night life, to the infamous shaved head incident, it seems that every one is talking about the pop princess, even if the subject matter isn’t her music.

The thinking behind this old adage, “any publicity is good publicity” comes from the fact that, even if the publicity is bad, at least your name is out there and people are talking about you. But does this philosophy work in business as well? Can businesses afford a PR meltdown and simply shrug it off, saying, “Well, at least it got our name in the paper?”

Bad video marketing and inept advertising may generate talk among the public, but will it eventually lead to a sale? Although your PR nightmare may cultivate discussion, it may be the wrong kind. You may lose credibility, respect, and good standing among current and potential buyers. Ultimately, successful businesses are made by old fashioned word of mouth: one person telling someone else about your services.

Veronika Noize and Jack Rubinger, on their site, The CEO Refresher, say that bad publicity isn’t the end of the world; you just have to put a positive spin on a bad situation. As they say in their article, “the public loves a good comeback story.” What do you think? Can bad publicity still lead to business success? 

This commercial from Buy.com has been getting a lot of air time recently, and I post it here because I feel it should be filed under “H” for “horrible” for one major reason: it equates the brand with something terribly offensive. When marketing your products and services, you want to leave your audience with a positive feeling and/or mental image about your company. Now everytime I hear “buy.com” I am immediately repulsed because the image of this commercial comes into my head. Use this spot as an example of what NOT to do when marketing your product or business.

However, I am aware of the irony that, although I label this commercial as “bad,” I am actually promoting it and Buy.com by posting it here. So that brings up the point that this spot might still be effective because it prompts the public to discuss its merits, or lack thereof. And it still succeeds in getting the Buy.com name out to its audience. I would be interested to know how this ad impacted the number of hits to their website.