Brand: Escada (Procter & Gamble)
Execution: Online Serial Web Video Drama, Blog, Podcast
Target: Men who buy perfume for women
Rating: *
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
The perfume Escada by Procter & Gamble gets full new media treatment with a website, podcast, blog and a serial drama (of sorts) intended to promote the brand.  The drama features short vignettes revolving around fashion including “The Dress” where the drama is supplied by Eva, who borrows a dress from Sophia only to find Jenny wearing the same dress.

What Works:
It is important for brands to try to understand social media and new media and to experiment with these media.  Sometimes these experiments will fail.  It does not mean that the lesson will not be worthwhile.

What Doesn’t:
To the casual brand observer, it looks like Procter & Gamble took a cosmetics brand and said to a new media agency “Do that web 2.0 stuff - you know, blog, podcast, webisodes, myspace.”  And that is exactly what the brand received - all of the stuff with no rhyme or reason whatsoever.

It is easy to count the successes of brands in new media because they are so visible.  When you’ve been forwarded the Smirnoff Raw Tea Video or a link to Brawny Academy for the ten-thousandth time, it seems obvious that these companies have done something useful.  Because new media is promoted by consumers, it is much harder to spot the failures.

Escada’s “Sunset Heat” is a failure.  It is so bad, in fact, that we are tempted to rank it as the worst of 2006 but we are certain there is worse that we simply have not seen.

The problems with this campaign?  Here they are by the numbers:

1. Shallow Characterizations -  The very short webisodes have no character development and virtually no plot.  They may be ironic, but they make the characters look unbelievably shallow, even by soap opera standards.
2. No Brand Positioning - With P&G as the author, we find it difficult to believe that there is no discernable positioning for the Escada brand but try as we might we cannot find it here.
3. Scattershot Approach - The choice of new media here seems to have been ‘try everything’.  Almost everything is tried here - badly.  It would have been better to choose one platform and devote real resources to it.

This campaign falls into the ’scrap it and move on’ category - we really don’t see enough that is useful to attempt to salvage any of it.

Branding Bottom Line:
Watching Sunset Heat is more painful than reading Ulysses at the beach.

Brand: National Car Rental
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here (it is the fifth spot) or Click Here (it is the seventh spot)
Target: Small to midsize businesses
Rating: *
Reviewer: David

Description:
These seven :15 second spots all feature short funny situations, many of which are embarrasing or just plain mean. All start with the caption “The Quickest ____” where the blank is everything from Game of Charades (a hairy guy starts to stand up and play and someone guesses “Planet of the Apes” correctly) to Job Interview (a woman knocks over a hand-built sailing ship as she shakes her prospective boss’s hand). After the setup, we see another screen saying “The Quickest Way to Rent from National.” Then we see a car leaving a National Car Rental lot as the voiceover says, “With the Emerald Club, you can bypass the counter, choose your own car and get an e-receipt. National. Green means go.”

What Works:
These spots are all funny and the pace is brisk. The brevity is helpful and keeps our attention. The campaign is very consistent and National Car Rental fans will certainly recognize it.

What Doesn’t:
As our loyal readers know, this advertising blog believes humor is a very tricky tool for advertisers. Used properly, it can reinforce the brand positioning and create a memorable spot tied to a memorable brand. More commonly, very good humor overshadows the commercial message and wastes the money spent. This campaign is a good example of the second case. All of these spots are funny, but the link between ‘quick disaster’ and ‘quick car rental’ is shallow and flimsy. There is no branding in the first half of the spot.

The brand positioning for National is also questionable in this spot. National must be talking to its own customer base, because it is advertising a standard category benefit (Emerald Club direct-to-car is a clone of Hertz #1 Club gold and similar programs from other agencies). There is no superiority claim made here, which is an odd strategy for a brand which is not in the top three in its category. If Emerald is indeed speaking to frequent Emerald renters, trying to keep them loyal then television would seem to be a foolishly expensive medium given the relatively small number of targets and the fact that Emerald can already reach them through direct mail, during a rental or in other more efficient ways.

Finally, it should be said that some of these spots are just mean. That does not reflect well on a brand which is in no way linked to a counter-culture.

Branding Bottom Line
National Car Rental takes the wrong lesson from Desperate Housewives