Brand: Dow (The Dow Chemical Company)
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here (it is the first campaign called ‘The Human Element’)
Target: Everyone
Rating: *
Reviewer: David

Description:
This narrative commercial connects the earth to elements and elements to people.

What Works:
The production values on this lavishly executed spot are film-worthy. The cinematography is impressive and the pacing and narrative closely follow documentary standards. This may impart some feeling of credibility with the viewer. Dow uses a simple combination (you are a combination of chemicals + we care about chemicals = we care about you) to link itself to humanity.

What Doesn’t:
This advertising blog has been unforgiving of corporations who do not sell to consumers but insist on using broadscale media to advertise. We understand the arguments – it’s good PR, gives the stock a halo and may give the company some protection from media attack. But we do not fundamentally see any evident which suggests that corporate advertising for brands or products which sell only business to business is useful or effective. This money would be better spent on trade advertising and real PR efforts.

Even ignoring this basic media planning issue, Dow’s new campaign stands out a singularly ineffective. The branding is almost non-existent in this spot. The Dow name flashes on the screen only for a brief moment before the end of the spot. And the brand proposition is missing. Dow gives us no reason to believe they are a better chemical company or even that a chemical company is a good thing to begin with. The argument is there (chemicals are life and they sustain life) but made so weakly that it is not recognizable.

Another executional error in the campaign was to use a voiceover talent who is either the same person who does the “MasterCard – Priceless” spots or has a voice close enough in pitch to be indistinguishable. Consumers who are familiar with that campaign will spend at least the first third of this spot waiting for prices to start appearing.

Dow’s inexperience at advertising has also led to an extremely and possibly needlessly expensive spot.  There are at least twenty different set-ups in this spot which have been shot all over the world. Beyond wasting money in broadscale media, this spot was extremely expensive to produce.

Branding Bottom Line:
Cleaning up the Union Carbide mess in Bhopal would do more to improve our image of Dow than this sweet, empty advertising.

Brand: Orbit Gum (Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company)
Execution: TV, Web, Phone
Link: Click Here (to see the spot, click on ‘Dirty’)
Target: Mis-spent Youths
Rating: ** (TV)/ **** (phone)
Reviewer: David

Description:
A TV campaign that has a series of spots featuring unlikely events and an attractive British woman in aviation outfits who gives the bad protagonists a chance to clean up their act with Orbit Gum. In this spot, Snoop Dogg is addressing a high school class, telling them about life as a gangster. He has apparently said something shocking, as all of their mouths are hanging open. Then a hole opens in the floor and he is sucked down to hell where a group of middle-age women are having a social in a living room with a red couch and flames on the ceiling. Each of the women is dressed in red and sports a set of horns in the middle of her forehead. As Snoop looks around, perplexed, one woman says, “Welcome Mr. Snoop. Your dirty mouth has landed you here with us. FOREVER!” Suddenly, the blonde British bombshell in a snug pristine white balooning outfit, holding a goat on a leash appears. “Dirty Mouth?” she says, “clean it up with Orbit Peppermint.” Snoop is suddenly transported to heaven, where attractive women in white lingerie lounge. “Fabulous!” the woman says and then “For a good clean feeling, no matter what,” She says and the goat bleats.

What Works:
Wm. Wrigley has done a great job encouraging its agency Energy BBDO to produce fresh, courageous and unexpected advertising. This advertising blog has been very impressed with the campaign for Winterfresh, although we were somewhat less enthusiastic about the campaign for Juicy Fruit.  Still, Wrigley understands that advertising in a world with TiVo, YouTube and SubZero refrigerators requires bold attempts to break through the clutter.  This distinctly odd spot as well as those which precede it in this campaign qualify in this regard.

There is good branding in this spot as the Orbit Gum package makes an appearance in the middle of the spot and is instrumental in saving the [anti-]hero from his doomed fate.  The positioning is not unique to the category, but cleaning up dirty mouths does put orbit in a distinctly different place from other Wrigley brands.

The online element of this campaign is also ingenious.  Website visitors are encouraged to sign up for a Snoop Dogg personal call, during which he gives them a code to unlock sites of the website that are initially blocked.  Although it is not clear what Wrigley will do with this information (particularly the phone numbers given the size of the national Do Not Call registry), it is an impressive method of data gathering which seems to take a lesson from the rampant popularity of celebrity ring tone downloads.

What Doesn’t:
Although the impact of this spot is impressive, the brand logic is impenetrable.  Does Orbit save bad people from fates they deserve?  Does cleaning up your mouth after the fact excuse anything?  How is Orbit unusually or uniquely able to do this?  This spot does not answer these questions – it does not even attempt this.  The answer instead is that the advertising is about showing something odd and cool, repeating it enough to associate it permanently with the brand and then hope that it will make the brand cool and desirable in the process.  It is a strategy that works for a very few brands and only when the advertising is consistenly unique.  We don’t think these spots make that cut.

Branding Bottom Line:
Orbit convinces us to stop hanging out with Snoop Dogg.

Brand: Silk Soymilk (WhiteWave Foods)
Execution: TV, Print
Link: Click Here
Target: Health-conscious adults
Rating: **
Reviewer: David

Description:
This campaign promotes Silk brand soymilk using actors wearing cow heads. Each TV spot has these people talking about the health benefits of Silk soymilk. There are five spots featuring Frank, Connie, Amanda, Sandy and Maxine each of whom has a different take on why they drink Silk Soymilk. Each spot ends after the brief monologue with the tagline, “Silk. Beyond nutrition.” Each character also has a print ad associated with them.

What Works:
This campaign relies primarily on :15 second spots which make their point and move on quickly, so pacing is not an issue. The cow heads on humans is a memorable execution. The copy of these spots is also punchy and promotes soy milk and soy protein from different points of view. Branding in these spots is good with multiple product shots of the Silk Soymilk carton.

What Doesn’t:
Using fake but memorable cows to endorse Silk Soymilk creates several problems in this campaign which are both strategic and tactical.This advertising blog has not been supportive of this trend in general (see our reviews of the Dasani spots here, for example), but the issues are different in this case. The primary issue is that there is a significant potential for confusion and misattribution. Since the strongest association of cows is with cows milk, some consumers may not initially understand the brand proposition if they are watching the cows heads more than listening to the copy.

The cows may also cause cognitive dissonance for vegetarians who are an important core target for Silk Soymilk. Even if they intellectually understand that Silk is making a strong pitch for non-dairy alternatives, vegetarians may be put off by the association of cows with the vegan product they consume daily.
This is category advertising as the spots position soymilk to be preferable to cowsmilk. While this may help the soymilk grow awareness, It is less likely to sell Silk over another brand of soymilk. As the largest brand, this tactic is appropriate since the greater opportunity for Silk may be converting new users from cow’s milk rather than increasing share against other brands.

The tonality of these spots is questionable. They were created to sound chatty and informal but may strike some consumers as patronizing or annoying.

Branding Bottom Line:
Thanks Silk – we didn’t know that Cows were producing soy milk.

Issue: Disney increasingly becomes a mainstream brand
Commentary by: David

Buried amid all of the hype for the spectacular $132mm opening weekend take for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” is an interesting branding question. What effect will releasing PG-13 movies with the Disney name have on the brand? The Wall Street Journal today summarized Disney’s strategy:

Disney said moviegoers of all ages turned out to see the PG-13-rated “Dead Man’s Chest,” which stars Johnny Depp as swashbuckling pirate Jack Sparrow. That interest is a prime example of Disney’s movie strategy: The studio is extending a move in recent years toward making more Disney-branded fare appealing to a broad audience.

While this strategy seems to make financial sense (PG-13 = broader audiences = more potential moviegoers = bigger profits), this advertising blog believes that Disney is making a serious error which will hurt the brand in the long term. The question Disney should be asking is:

What Does Disney Stand For?
We know what Disney has traditionally stood for: children. Family-friendly entertainment was a means to creating the best possible experience for children. In fact, Disney has been so successful in this quest that the brand has a created a huge reservoir of trust with parents. Want to pop a DVD in the player for the kids to watch? If it has “Disney” on the box you don’t need to worry about it – it’s fine for young kids.

How Does Pirates Change This?
Disney’s move to use the Disney name instead of Touchstone Films (which they had set up to insulate the children’s franchise name Disney from adult titles) on films like the original Pirates and the sequels is slowly but surely undermining Disney’s expertise in children’s entertainment. It is clear that Disney believes this to be a good thing. But it is not. Imagine all of the places that your children would like to go for a vacation. Disney is somewhere near the top of this list, right? To get your tourism dollar, Disney World and Disneyland simply have to keep you from vetoeing your child’s vote.

Now imagine where you might choose to take your family for a vacation if it was entirely up to you. The Bahamas? Europe? This list is much longer and Disney may not feature so prominently on it. Here is the central dilemma of this Disney positioning choice – when Disney stops being the #1 choice for children and starts being family fare – or even worse mainstream entertainment – it loses its competitive advantage. Like thousands of brands from Pierre Cardin to The Ground Round, Disney risks losing its expertise and thereby its competitive power.

This will not happen overnight, of course. Pirates of the Caribbean will not confuse many parents who know what to expect, and the Disney name is fairly small on the original movie’s DVD packaging. But over time, expect to see a real shift in what Disney means. Competitors from Six Flags to Time Warner should be licking their chops because if Disney continues to follow this path they will be easy prey to more focused brands.

Issue: Wal-Mart Expands Financial Services to Low-Income Consumers
Commentary by: David

The Wall Street Journal‘s Robin Sidel and Ann Zimmerman report today that Wal-Mart is aggressively expanding services for low-income consumers including check cashing, bill payment, money orders and remittances.

To some this may sound like a turn in the wrong direction – and conflicts with Wal-Mart’s prettified, glamour turn under ex-Target employee, Chief Marketing Officer John Fleming. It’s not. It is the first sign of a shrewd marketing strategy from the Bentonville giant in months. And it comes from the operations department (the project falls under Jane Thompson, President of Wal-Mart’s financial services operations).

Why are we so bullish on this race to serve the bottom of the market by Wal-Mart? First a bit of background.

The Dreadful State of Financial Services for Low Income Consumers
Offering financial services to low income earners is an unhip business. On the one side we have check cashing operations who typically charge low income earners without traditional bank accounts 2.5% to 3.0% of face value to cash a check. Yes, you did read that correctly. It doesn’t matter if it is a personal check or a business check, these folks have to pay $25 to $30 to cash a $1000 paycheck. That’s not the worst side of these establishments, either. The real game here is loans. These operations will lend against a future ‘payday’ to consumers who have little income and almost no credit. But thanks to current banking laws they charge enormous fees to do so. From the website of Payday Today – part of ACE Cash Express, Inc. the largest check-cashing store concern:

Payday loan fees are very expensive, particularly if a loan is extended over time. The fee charged for a payday loan is equivalent to a 250-650% Annual Percentage Rate (APR), which is by far one of the most expensive loan options on the market.

That may sound like usury to normal income earners, but it is legal in this industry. It is no surprise, then that banking industry reps are opposed to the move. The Wall Street Journal quotes Bruce Spitzer, spokesman for the Massachusetts Bankers Association saying “We don’t think this is a good service for consumers.” Apparently providing loans with a 650% APR is a good service, however.

The other side of the business is remittances. This is the practice of sending money to foreign countries which is usually done by legal or illegal immigrants who are supporting families for their home country. This is a much more competitive and respectable business which started with foreign operations such as the Dominican financial services company Quisqueyana. But the services offered by these organizations are limited as they do not have bank charters.

Why ‘Always Low Prices’ Positioning Helps Low Income Consumers Cashing Checks
What Wal-Mart does is to put a lot of money back into the hands of these low-income consumers. For instance, Wal-Mart charges 46 cents for a money order versus as much as $1.30 at the U.S. Post Office. Instead of paying up to $30 to cash a $1000 check, Wal-Mart charges a maximum of $3.

The beef against Wal-Mart from Bruce Spitzer and his ilk is that it’s just trying to get people to make impulse purchases when they have money in their hands. Mr. Spitzer obviously doesn’t understand Wal-Mart’s relationship to the low-income consumer, however. These people come to buy necessities in bulk at low prices. They are in no sense less responsible than more affluent consumers. In fact, Wal-Mart confirms that only 14% of check cashers make a purchase in the same visit.

Why this is good strategy for Wal-Mart:
Wal-Mart’s average consumer earns $38,000 which is below the U.S. Median Family income of $42,000. Target, on the other hand caters to a tonier consumer, earning an average of $58,000. This advertising blog has long argued that trying to compete with Target for these affluent consumers is a fools errand for Wal-Mart. Target has tapped into a vein of unserved desires with its ‘Design for All’ mission and Wal-Mart is confusing its ‘Always Low Prices’ image when it advertises in Vogue or makes a big show of offering organic food or upscale merchandies in the stores.

Wal-Mart grew into the most valuable company in the world by offering a better deal to the average Joe and Jane – those lower and middle income wage earners in rural areas who were paying high margins to small retailers a generation ago.

The best opportunity for Wal-Mart is not to expand its target to upper-income consumers but to find more ways to better serve its core consumer. There will be no shortage of low income consumers in years to come even if the ranks of the mass affluent continue to grow.

Wal-Mart which so often seems to find itself as the source of social evils finally has a significant chance to do some good. By demolishing the abusive and demeaning check cashing industry, Wal-Mart can offer low-income consumers some of the same basic economic rights that affluent earners enjoy. By innovating and perhaps even joining forces with other companies like G.E. who are making a push into this sector, they can provide a jump-start for the lower end of the U.S. economy.

Brand: Coca-Cola
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Coke Lovers
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David

Description:
A bearded young man puts a Euro into a Coca-Cola vending machine and we’re transported behind the plastic face of the machine into a fantasy world where the coin rolls down a mountainside and splashes into a waterfall. An empty Coca-Cola bottle flys past, borne by three plump flying bugs. They drop the bottle into a tower where it is filled with Coke. Furry creatures kiss the outside of the bottle as the bottle cap is catapulted into place. Then a giant hand sends the bottle screaming along a track through a tunnel. When it reemerges it is in an artic landscape, where snowmen are put through a snowblower that chills the Coke bottle. The bottle drops through a hole and appears in a skyscape, plopping into a moving walkway where it is feted and cheered by cannons shooting confetti. At the end of this walkway, the bottle rolls down a chute and ends up in the bin of the vending machine, where the young man picks it up. As he drinks it, we see him pause to look down at the bottle and then the machine and smile as he walks on.

What Works:
Although it is hard to argue that this spot is positioned quite as well as Wieden USA’s marquis spot for the brand (see our review here), it is a marvelous feat of imagination. This work from Wieden + Kennedy’s Amsterdam office shows a startling ingenuity which is absent from most of the advertising for this category. As we have noted previously, we believe that the strongest position for brand Coca-Cola is as a social connector. Coke brings people together and is uniquely connected to the best moments in our life. This spot does not argue with this positioning for Coke but expands on the magical nature of the ‘reason why’ Coke is able to connect people. Although the brand user in this spot is a solitary young man, Coke brings an entire social experience into the bottle he purchases. The concept of the drink bringing group happiness to an individual may be difficult in theory but it is executed well in this spot.

Of course it is the stunning graphics and brilliant realization of this ‘Coke Side of Life’ that moves this spot and makes it endlessly viewable. Wieden understands that great advertising must be compelling and this spot scores high on entertainment value without losing the brand. The spot has excellent ownability because the execution feels very much akin to the iconic Coke Polar Bear spots – it has the same emotional intensity with superior animation.

What Doesn’t:
It is fair to wonder whether the stretch between the magical world that Coca-Cola creates in this spot and the mundane world where consumers buy bottles and cans of Coke will be too wide for this spot to have an effect on Coke sales or brand equity. It really is a very high-concept production, which lacks significant linkage to the world we live in. On balance, however, we believe that this spot will be strongly positive for the brand.

Branding Bottom Line:
Coke surprises us again with an engaging, magical spot.

Brand: Miller Lite (Miller Brewing Co.)
Execution: TV, Web
Link: Click Here
Target: Men’s men
Rating: **
Reviewer: David

Description:
This campaign features a series of spots set in a glass-encased room in the middle of a warehouse. A group of known and unknown manly-men (including Burt Reynolds, Jerome Bettis, Eddie Griffin, a professional wrestler, a rodeo star and the rock climber who sawed through his own arm with a pocket knife to save himself and others) sit around a conference table. In each spot these uber-men debate and vote on a ‘man law’. One spot concerns the question of dating a best-friend’s ex-girlfriend (okay after six months unless she’s really hot), clinking beer bottles (from the bottom is better) and whether you can bring beer to a party and then take it back (you can take one beer home if it can fit in your pocket – the rest must stay). The website allows Miller Lite Fans to add and edit their own manlaws.

What Works:
These spots are easy to follow and moderately entertaining. There is relatively good branding which improves for the spots which feature the Miller Lite bottles as part of the ‘manlaws’. The most functional part of this campaign is the ease with which new spots can be generated. Each spot is short and involves a single set-up, or two at most. There are no CGI effects or expensive locations. Talent is a concern, but other than Griffin, the rest of the talent comes from the B, C & D-list and the pool is big enough that the ensemble does not rest with a single player. This helps Miller combat the single biggest issue with television advertising – viewer fatigue. Most brands and agencies significantly overestimate the durability of their campaign executions and fatigue consumers with too much exposure. A campaign which allows new spots to be executed cheaply and quickly with no loss in quality is a significant asset for the brand.

What Doesn’t:
In spite of the efficiency of these lean spots, this campaign has serious flaws. The most significant is ownability. There is absolutely nothing that ties Miller Lite uniquely to these ‘manlaws.’ In fact the campaign struggles to establish universality for the manlaws and in doing so eliminates the possibility of ownability for Miller. The practical effect of this is that even if Miller Lite has enough branding to ensure that related recall for these spots is reasonable, the campaign does not build the brand in the longterm, only (possibly) the category. Relevance is another serious issue. Why does the existance of the manlaws council interest us in Miller Lite? It certainly puts a masculine cast on Lite beer, but it never convinces us that Miller is uniquely masculine among lite beers nor does it give us any other good reason for sticking to Miller Lite. This advertising blog has criticized many of the campaigns in the beer genre (with the notable exception of Miller High Life) and this advertising falls squarely into that undistinguished company.

Branding Bottom Line:
Miller gives men just what we need – more rules.  Still, any company that hires the guy who cut through his own arm to save himself can’t be all bad.