Say you’re a Bavarian motorcycle company and you want to show off the performance of your new sport bike…
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How impressionable are women? Apparently extremely impressionable, according to a new advertisement for the fragrance Twist from Axe, a Unilever brand. The advertisement shows a woman who is restless on her first date with a guy who she is only marginally interested in. Then a few robots show up and completely transform the guy several times throughout the course of the evening (from cutting his hair to changing his outfit). The woman becomes excited at his various transformations and the spark continues to develop throughout their date.
Continue reading ‘Crowdsourcing and the Extremely Impressionable “Twist” Ad’
Do we still call it culture jamming when it’s an ad?
For many Cablevision patrons, Sunday was a day filled with several stages of emotion, to say the least. Subscribers got wind that the Disney-ABC/Cablevision deal was far from finalized at midnight on March 6th, when Cablevision’s contract with ABC expired. This meant that WABC Channel 7 would be unavailable to customers until negotiations were finalized…and also meant that the 82nd Academy Awards would be nothing more than a blank screen on customers’ TVs.
Thanks to the age of virtual media, all was not lost to customers who took the time and savvy to search for alternatives. You had the option to purchase a Digital-to-Analog TV converter box ($60 at Best Buy for the NS-DXA1 model) and antenna to tap into the free ABC station using the old-fashioned method. Or you could have looked at the Associated Press’ livestream of the Oscar red carpet online and read their live blogs about the awards (note: the AP did not have the rights to broadcast the actual Oscars; you would have been privy to newsfeed that had a 2-3 second delay), which is all very well and good — if you’re not a diehard Oscars fan.
But the majority of the 3.1 million customers serviced by Cablevision were beyond irate and other cable networks like Time Warner sent a letter to their customers assuring them that their ABC service was not ‘yet’ at risk.
There has been so much back and forth about the Disney-ABC/ Cablevision fiasco: Disney says Cablevision owes them $40 million under an agreement and the latter still has yet to pay; the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the number could be in the neighborhood of $1 per subscriber per month. The bottom line is that the customer doesn’t care about these nuances because he or she just wants what is being paid for: the channels.
To say this is extremely poor publicity for Cablevision would be an understatement (I cannot imagine how many last-minute calls were made by angry customers to Verizon FiOS, requesting an impromptu change). And this isn’t the first time Cablevision has dropped channels. Remember, that The Food Network and the HGTV channels disappeared last January because of a contract dispute with Scripps Network Interactive? The reason for that drop was that Scripps is in a financial mess and Cablevision was unable to reach a ‘reasonable’ agreement with the network. Time Warner had a similar problem with Scripps, but they were able to offer these two channels under a temporary agreement while negotiations continued.
While corporate America continues to thrive on greed, companies need to be careful not to destroy their public image and reputation. For a cable company to play Scrooge and sacrifice customer service on the day of the Oscars was a ballsy move and I’m suspecting Cablevision restored service at the last minute because of the large volume of irate customer calls, virtual backlash and dropout rates.
In the end, the Oscar in this mess has to go to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) who has been in touch with both companies during this dispute. In a statement on Sunday morning, the FCC said, “Consumers should not suffer due to the inability of these two companies to successfully negotiate a deal.”
Someone should have given the FCC a gold statue during the 82nd Awards Ceremony for acknowledging the needs of the consumer. Let us never forget how inexplicably linked a company’s brand and image are to public perception and customer satisfaction.
If you’ve been following the case of Governor Patterson (and what New York State denizen hasn’t?), you would have heard that his Communications Director resigned yesterday following the development of the two Governor scandals that were unveiled to the public.
Peter Kauffmann stepped down yesterday, citing “integrity and commitment to public services” as values he takes “seriously.”
Patterson has been charged with illegally obtaining World Series tickets from the Yankees (a felony that could cost him over $90,000 in fines and some jail time because he lied about the fact under oath), and also for interfering with a domestic abuse case involving top aide, David Johnson.
Governor Patterson
Of course, from a communications perspective, such an issue is everyone’s worst fear. How does Patterson proceed from here, and should the Director of Communications (who is supposed to be his right arm during crises) have resigned?
In every situation involving clients and the public, integrity and honesty have to be placed on a pedestal. It doesn’t matter what the situation is: the clean and most honorable thing would be to tell the truth because the public can see through veiled statements, no matter how much legal jargon and opinion can twist the facts.
In such a circumstance, it is important for personnel like Kauffmann to maintain their integrity as well. If the client (in this case, Patterson) and Kauffmann cannot see eye-to-eye and convey a sense of truth to the public, then indeed, one of them must bid the situation adieu.
Patterson’s case reminds me of several political scandals including those of Spitzer and Clinton: two situations where their lawyers desperately sought to twist and angle the truth. But if the truth is this palpable and strong, the most honorable and perfectly clean way to communicate it to the public would be to admit the wrongdoing.
STC Associates is in the news – again!
Sophie Ann Terrisse, STC Associates CEO, was featured as a guest author in Telecom 2.0 this month. The article “Strategy for a New Decade: Brand or Die” discusses how branding will determine a telecom operator’s fate in the global marketplace.
Check out the article here – and give us your feedback!
Quick, name something that you use every day but have no idea how it works, or what exactly it’s doing.
Seems silly right? Well what if that thing was a web browser? Hmm. not as silly now is it?
Google has an illustrative video over on youtube.
What does this mean for web designers and developers? A lot more than the layman might think, especially when the dominant web browser for the past 10 years, Internet Explorer (or, as I’ve been known to call it, Demon Spawn from Hell) doesn’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world, making you do more work just to get visual and functional parity between it and the rest of the world.
However there is a bright spot on the horizon (at least for use web developers) it’s about to die a well deserved death. IE6 holdouts, expect to see more of these in your future.
When the news broke about Toyota’s recall, I felt like I used to feel when I was a teacher and the smart, disciplined student who always sat in the front row cheated for the first time.
Then, the details unfolded. The narrative shifted. What was once a tale of Toyota’s fall from grace devolved into an epic of customer betrayal, as the media reported incidents of Toyota’s lack of responsiveness to customer complaints. For years, the straight-A brand had been making decisions not guided by its commitment to transparency and safety. As the President of Toyota said during congressional hearings this week, “We lost sight of our customers.”
Like Toyota, my straight-A student had been having problems for years. She’d been allowing other students to copy her work. In fact, she was somewhat relieved at being caught. She could finally talk about the problem of peer and academic pressure. I told her that everyone makes mistakes — it’s how we learn and grow from those mistakes that makes us leaders.
I am, by no means, calling the Toyota recall a “sophomoric” mistake. Toyota’s eight-million car recall has planted the seed of doubt and paranoia among customers.
But, Toyota can still lead. Like my straight-A student, Toyota has been influenced by the pressure to perform at all costs. We have heard about capacity issues that impacted the quality of Toyota’s production. And, we know that large-scale business crises are often the product of a short-term focus on quarterly results instead of the long-term brand strategy and promise.
In one sense, Toyota is already helping competitors learn from its hard knocks. That leadership should frame a new story about the brand. I’d like to see Toyota start talking about how it will lead a movement to bridge the gap between innovation and safety in the automotive industry.
The automotive industry can still learn from Toyota, and the brand can lead again. (Incidentally, my straight-A student is about to graduate from Skidmore College at the top of her class.) But, Toyota needs more than time to fix the breach in customer trust. Toyota must be and lead the change customers want to see.