March 28, 2024

Advertising: Holocaust Museum Plans Call to Action for 20th Anniversary Campaign

Now a new advertising campaign for the 20th anniversary of the museum highlights what it has done, and what others can do, to prevent future atrocities. The ads promote a tour to four cities where free, one-day events will feature items from the museum’s collection as well as seminars and films.

Among the workshops moderated at the events is one called “Technology in the hands of haters,” a theme addressed in the advertising campaign.

“What if Hitler had access to the Internet?” asks a newspaper ad that appeared recently in Southern Florida publications including The Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel and Jewish Journal for the first event, in Boca Raton, Fla., which took place Sunday.

Advertisements usually pitch products, but these, like the museum itself, promote a firm grasp of history and a call to action. “Who was responsible for the Holocaust?” asks another ad, which continues, “Challenge your assumptions.” Another: “Can we make ‘Never again’ more than a promise? Absolutely. Learn how.”

The tagline for the ads, and the theme of the anniversary events: “Never again. What you do matters.”

The campaign was produced collaboratively by the museum and by agencyEA, a Chicago-based experiential marketing agency that also helped plan the anniversary events. The ads also will run in regional publications to promote future stops on the tour in the coming year in Los Angeles (Feb. 17), New York (March 3) and Chicago (June 9).

Along with print advertising, the campaign includes online advertising and underwriting announcements on NPR affiliates.

Holocaust survivors will speak at the events, where visitors also can bring family artifacts from the era to be examined by the museum curatorial staff. Each stop also will include a tribute ceremony for both local survivors and World War II veterans who helped liberate concentration camps.

The four stops for the tour were selected because they are “where the populations of survivors and World War II veterans are fairly large,” said Lorna Miles, chief marketing officer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

While the museum has in the past placed advertising for specific exhibits, Ms. Miles said that the new campaign was the first time that it had done “a comprehensive cross-channel campaign like this.”

The idea of applying marketing and branding principles to a museum dedicated to so tragic a topic might sound incongruous, but not to Ms. Miles, who became its first chief marketing officer in 2009.

“I do feel that the museum has an extraordinary brand, and that its reputation is impeccable,” said Ms. Miles. “And my job as the chief marketing officer is not just to protect that brand, but also to promote it.”

Seeds for the museum were first planted in 1978, when President Jimmy Carter established a commission to examine the state of Holocaust remembrance and education.

In 1979, the commission issued four main recommendations, including building a Holocaust memorial, and in 1980 Congress established a council to plan the memorial, with Elie Wiesel, the novelist and Holocaust survivor, named as its chairman.

The effort was completed in 1993, with speakers at the ceremony including President Bill Clinton and Mr. Wiesel. The first visitor to cross the threshold was the Dalai Lama.

Museum administrators who may have worried that visitors would not be drawn to a museum dedicated to such horrific events, or that it might be of less interest to non-Jews, found the opposite to be true. Early visitors spent an average of three hours, nearly twice what had been anticipated, and some exhibits became so bottlenecked with crowds that the exhibits were rearranged to improve the flow of visitors.

As of Aug. 1, according to the museum, it has drawn more than 34.1 million visitors, about 90 percent of them non-Jewish, and 34 percent of them school-age children.

To honor its 20th anniversary, a section of the museum’s Web site offers suggestions for 20 actions. Suggestions include inviting Holocaust survivors and veterans who helped liberate camps to speak at community events, taking an online pledge to help address genocide today and encouraging local schools to adopt Holocaust educational programs.

Along with the national tour, the museum also will host a two-day commemoration next year in Washington, beginning with a tribute dinner at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on April 28. On April 29, a dinner, ceremony and open house at the museum will feature Mr. Wiesel and European officials.

More than a slogan, the tagline for the campaign, “Never again,” is a rallying cry for the museum.

“Hate on the Internet is on the rise, anti-Semitism is on the rise, Holocaust denial is on the rise,” Ms. Miles said. “The relevance and importance of the museum and the urgency of our work to educate about the lessons of the Holocaust has never been greater.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/business/media/holocaust-museum-plans-call-to-action-for-20th-anniversary-campaign.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Advertising: Tostitos’ New Spokesman Is the Product Itself

The new life-of-the-party campaign resurrects the top-selling snack’s 1990s theme. “ ‘Tostitos Knows How to Party’ means we are returning to our roots,” said Janelle Anderson, the brand’s senior director for marketing. Tostitos, along with Lay’s, Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos and Ruffles, is a product of PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division, based in Plano, Tex.

Tostitos returned to the ’90s theme after marketing research over the last year found that its customers wanted reasons to celebrate and have fun in economically lean times.

“We’ve always been about social and about connection,” Ms. Anderson said. “And, as the economy is changing, we are evolving, and wanted to strengthen our fun and uplifting image.”

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Tostitos chose a zany character “to get the message across and make it authentic,” said Ms. Anderson. “We wanted something that was magnetic, fun and approachable.”

The brand’s new advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the Omnicom Group, decided to “bring personality to the brand, and, in one of those rare cases, have the actual product be the actual spokesperson,” said Brett Craig, the group’s creative director for Tostitos.

Working with Legacy Effects, a Los Angeles special effects company, the agency developed the hand-manipulated puppet with movable parts and special effects to convey energy, said Mr. Craig.

The custom puppet appears in two 30-second commercials, the first of which is called “Life of the Football Party,” where its boasting grabs the attention of friends at a football-watching party. The second, “Inspired to Dip,” comically tracks the chip’s compatibility with dips.

Tostitos will present one spot during the Rose Bowl on Monday, then five commercials will be shown before and during the 41st Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, where Oklahoma State is playing Stanford at the University of Phoenix Stadium. Last year, Tostitos presented only three spots during the college football matchup.

Its ads also will be shown on cable channels, including Bravo, Lifetime and Food Network, for 10 months, and on local stations and ESPN during the football season. Last year, Tostitos spent $34.5 million on advertising, Kantar Media research found. The brand spent $26.8 million for the first nine months of this year compared to $29.6 million for the same period in 2010, according to Kantar Media.

Tostitos plans to ramp up its spending in 2012, Ms. Anderson said. She did not provide specifics except to say that the brand would nearly double its digital buy.

The energetic chip character will be on the Tostitos Facebook page as well as in banner ads, she said, but noted that “television is still the foundation of our campaign.”

“This is a competitive market, with chips alone being about $2 billion,” she said. Shipments of tortilla chips and similar corn products like curls reached $5.3 billion in 2007, according to United States Census Bureau figures. Dips are a separate category.

Marketers first focused Tostitos, introduced in 1981, around the idea of escape. “It was a trendy new Mexican food that, over the years, became mainstream,” Ms. Anderson said.

Since then, Tostitos has expanded to about a dozen varieties, like Fire-Roasted Chipotle and Hint of Lime, and varied its marketing approach. After the social connections theme in the ’90s, the brand introduced its Scoops chips in 2000, and shifted its focus to everyday social occasions and then to highlighting the ingredients in its chips.

In particular, the brand emphasized that its ingredients — corn, oil and salt — were natural, as consumers became more focused on the content and calories of packaged snacks.

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While Tostitos sales have slipped in recent years, the Tostitos Natural variety had the highest sales gains last year of PepsiCo’s brands, according to Mintel Group’s March 2011 salty snacks report. When final sales figures are tallied for this year, sales of tortilla chips over all are expected to pick up and continue to grow to a $6 billion market in 2015, according to Mintel.

Tostitos, which switched advertising agencies last summer, has moved away from its earlier theme that technology brings people together. During the Fiesta Bowl’s halftime last January, the brand sponsored surprise reunions between returning soldiers and their families.

This month, Tostitos introduced its latest campaign with an event, “Tostitos Fiesta in the Square,” which converted an area in New York’s Times Square to a regulation-size football end zone and invited fans to a field goal kicking contest.

The singer and television personality Nick Lachey and football notables like Jim Kelly, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback who is in the Hall of Fame, were in the event, which set a world record with 181 field goals kicked in six hours.

As a result, Tostitos pledged a $200,000 donation to the charity Big Brothers Big Sisters and started an online drive for fans to donate to the charity on facebook.com/Tostitos or bbbs.org/Tostitos until Jan. 31.

Highlights from the event will be shown at halftime at the Fiesta Bowl, and Tostitos plans to give the charity a check for $200,000 along with a matching sum, up to $25,000, for any online donations.

Tostitos has been associated with gatherings to watch televised sports, with sales surging around football and summer seasons, and wants to expand its consumer base to make its chips a must-have at small and large gatherings, said Ms. Anderson.

“The majority of our customers purchase Tostitos between five and 10 times a year,” she noted, with a spike in the first two months of the year, then around Memorial Day to Labor Day.

The adoption of a party-theme campaign, she said, “is a return to our heritage.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 29, 2011

An earlier version of this article mistakenly said the Rose Bowl would be played New Year’s Day. It will be played Monday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3f4059a1b907ff610eabe7ddb34b4e7b

Media Decoder Blog: Group Says Newspapers Aren’t Dead, They’re Alluring

With more people getting their daily dose of news online through blogs and social media sites, traditional newspapers have gotten short shrift. Print is dead or dying, say media experts, and advertising can’t keep pace.

Ads by the Newspaper Association of America promote  the idea of being informed.Ads by the Newspaper Association of America promote  the idea of being informed.

A new advertising campaign from the Newspaper Association of America seeks to change those views and focus on how reading newspapers — in their digital or print incarnations — actually makes users sexy.

On Monday, the association will announce a consumer marketing campaign that extols the virtues of newspapers, and by extension the news that they provide, as being something that makes people more informed, aware and savvy.

“Smart is the new sexy” reads the tagline for the campaign, which was created by the Martin Agency, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

“Be able to find Iran on a map,” says one ad that shows an illustration of a woman reading a print newspaper at a table. “Know what the city council is up to behind closed doors,” it continues.

“There’s no question that newspapers are undergoing a significant transformation, and we wanted to underline some of that,” said Caroline Little, chief executive of the N.A.A. “It’s a campaign for what newspapers represent, whether they are in print, online or mobile.”

What they represent, Ms. Little said, are the ideals of an informed citizenry and democracy.

The campaign also comes at a time when newspaper newsrooms have faced devastating financial and staff cuts. A weak print advertising market and smaller profit on digital advertising have exacerbated the trend. Some newspapers, like The New York Times, are experimenting with pay models while others are finding alternative revenue streams through things like daily deal Web sites.

“We all grew up assuming that the world would have the kind of journalism that newspapers provide,” said Mike Hughes, the president of the Martin Agency. “The fact is the financing model for newspapers has radically changed over the years. We have to be thought of in new ways.”

With an election year on the horizon and a plethora of news events that include the world economy and political and social upheaval in the Middle East, newspapers are more vital than ever, Mr. Hughes said. And therein lies the sexy factor.

“Who wants to go to a cocktail party and not know what’s going on in the world?” Mr. Hughes said. “You’ll be sexier if you’re current with what’s going on in the world.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e3cbae40ad4edaad929274e99ae18430

Advertising: Campaign Trains Viewers for ‘TV Everywhere’

A new advertising campaign by Turner Broadcasting aims to tell them how. In a series of commercials that will start appearing on Monday on the TNT and TBS cable channels, Turner stars like Conan O’Brien will be employed to explain the concept of TV Everywhere, which has been championed by Turner’s parent, Time Warner, as a way to retain cable subscribers.

The concept calls for episodes of television shows to be streamed online free — but only for people who already have a cable subscription. In the making for the better part of two years, TV Everywhere is now being introduced, and Turner wants subscribers to know. The ad campaign “is to educate viewers about the value they can unlock,” said Steve Koonin, the president of Turner Entertainment Networks.

“Consumers have bought tens of millions of iPhones and iPads,” Mr. Koonin said in an interview last week. “Our vision is that TV Everywhere kind of becomes the consumer-enabling technology that allows them to unlock the potential of those devices.”

The ad campaign encourages people to download TBS and TNT apps on their phones and tablets to start watching television episodes online and on demand. The apps require users to log in — or, in industry parlance, authenticate — to confirm that they are paying subscribers to a participating cable or satellite company.

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The log-in process has taken a long time to put in place, but most of the major companies are now participating, including DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Verizon FiOS, and ATT U-verse.

The biggest distributor missing from the list is Time Warner Cable, which is promoting its own app that allows streaming of some channels. Time Warner Cable has also not supported HBO GO, the app that allows on-demand viewing of films and shows on HBO, which like Turner is a unit of Time Warner. Though they sound related, Time Warner and Time Warner Cable have been separate companies since splitting in March 2009.

HBO GO has already been used by millions of people since its widespread introduction early this year. Like the Turner apps, it is promoted on HBO’s main channel; Mr. Koonin recalled seeing a commercial last month that said a coming episode of “Entourage” was already available via the HBO GO app. He logged on to watch it right away, and “it made that iPad more valuable,” he said.

Turner’s campaign includes both humorous instances of people watching shows on phones and tablets and tutorials about how to do so. In one spot, Mr. O’Brien, whose talk show is on TBS, comes trudging onto his late-night stage for a promotional shoot in a suit of iPads, iPhones and BlackBerrys — the joke being that someone was confused about the purpose of the shoot.

“Watch any device on Conan,” the director says.

A narrator then explains more accurately: “Now watch Conan and all your favorite TBS shows wherever, whenever you want.”

The cast of TNT’s “Leverage” stars in another spot, taking turns singing lines from the Richard Marx song “I’ll Be Right Here Waiting for You.” Television episodes, viewers are told, are waiting for them anytime on the Web.

The spots were conceived by the Grey Group, a unit of the WPP Group, and produced with the help of Turner. Those that include Mr. O’Brien were directed by Bryan Buckley, who was also responsible for the Conan-in-India commercial for American Express last year.

Some of the spots will be shown during Turner’s baseball playoff broadcasts, which usually attract a big audience.

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The campaign also includes a longer spot, to be posted on YouTube, which details how to download the apps and log in to a participating cable or satellite company. It is not always easy at first; the spot advises people to have their cable bill handy for their account number. “We’ll run that on air also when we have long-form opportunities,” Mr. Koonin said.

Critically for Turner, the online streams of its television episodes include the same commercials as the traditional telecasts, and Nielsen includes the online streams in its commercial ratings that include three days of playback, which is standard in the industry.

“Meaning, if they watch ‘The Closer’ on Wednesday on their iPad, we get as much credit as if they watched at 9:06 on Monday night,” Mr. Koonin said.

Some shows on TBS and TNT, like repeats of the sitcom “Friends,” are not available for online viewing. “Some deals that were done many years ago never contemplated these kinds of rights,” Mr. Koonin acknowledged. But he added, “for the most part, the shows that are hits, they are on there.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=09238196a00b761562dbe93d90bb7c87