Thanks to @therealdonaldtrump this ad became a political statement

Budweiser's 2017 Superbowl ad tells the tale of how a German immigrant (Adolphus Busch) struggled into New Orleans, but then lived his dream when he partnered with Eberhard Anheuser to start brewing Budweiser. (See also the Wikipedia history of Anheuser-Busch)

Of course, given Donald Trump's so-called #muslimban just a few days old, the internet has welcomed the Budweiser commercial as a political statement against closed borders and in favor of the true industrious potential of immigrants that made America great (pun intended).

Now, the truth probably is just opposite to that. Most likely, it is Donald Trump's Executive Order that turned this ad into a political statement. See also the comment in this AdAge article. 

What's more, there seems to be a trend in recent ads from the Anheuser-Busch Inbev family to focus on these historic roots, with a striking similarity between ads to touch upon nostalgia, authenticity, and a claim for decades of expertise.

See for instance these examples:

Happy Birthday, New Coke (°March 23, 1985)

Tuesday April 23rd of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company launched New Coke. This still remains one of the major cases in the marketing literature. It often ranks first in all-time lists of marketing fails (such as on marketwired, or in Matt Haig's book Brand Failures). Apart from the obvious failure (for the short version, see below; for the longer version, see Wikipedia), I think it is also a good demonstration of the intangible part of brand value, which I will explain below.

"A/B testing"? That's just slang for "experimental research".

A/B testing originated in advertising as a way to tell which of two types of communications (like two versions of an advertisement) where most effective in driving sales. Since the seminal book by Hopkins on "Scientific Advertising" (1923), the technique has been used in retail as well (e.g. in deciding on effective store design) and most recently in the design of websites. It is with regard to the latter that the term has rapidly gained even more attention and many (mostly) commercial websites now regularly do A/B testing to test certain design options (e.g. should one use the words "Buy Now" or "Order" for the check-out box). Some refer to such a website design test with "split test" because the test actually splits the visitors of the website in different groups, each seeing a different version of the website, and monitors key performance indicators such as check-outs, likes, or clicks.

Why is this just the same as experimental research? The gist of A/B testing is that you manipulate at least one aspect (e.g., call-to-action, color, piece of text, positioning, ...) of your website. Experimental research would say that aspect is your independent variable. To do so, you have to design at least two versions of that website, each having a different value on the design variable you want to test (e.g., "buy now" vs "order" call-to-action). Each instance of the website could be called a condition. You then randomize the visitors to the website such that you can observe the visitors' behavior in each. This observation is what one would label the dependent measure as one thinks its value will at least partly depend on the value of the manipulated design variable. In sum, this is the description of the most basic experiment (and of the majority of A/B tests).

You see, the basics for the two are the same. They even share a bit of history. Though experimental research is older than A/B testing is, the first landmark publication is from the same era as Hopkins' book: Fisher's "The Arrangement of Field Experiments" dates back to 1926. Despite that similarity, I do believe that current A/B testing has not yet benefitted from the long tradition and theoretical advancements academics have made since then. Experimentation has been a core research method in agriculture, biomedicine, psychology, communication, etc. This resulted in crucial insights in the design, execution, measurement, and analysis of experiments. If these advances are being applied in A/B testing than they are surely not wildly shared.
(I will follow up on this post with one or more posts on specific experimentation insights that could be worthwhile from an A/B testing perspective)

Why does the above actually matter?
For students it implies that there might be a lot of transferable skills hiding in your courses. Try to understand experimental research, its subtleties, and the creativity involved with it. You might find it even more relevant after graduation when confronted with your own instance of A/B testing whatever content you will be producing professionally. For testers it implies that tests could benefit a lot from the extensive academic tradition of experimental research.

(Disclaimer: A great post by @peeplaja inspired me for this post. Thanks to @ElienDJ for tweeting about that post).

Cashing in on confessions: The Lance interview

Today and tomorrow, the Oprah Winfrey Network will broadcast Oprah's interview with Lance Armstrong. The much hyped and anticipated interview will generate a massive amount of viewers, not only in the US but also worldwide.What an advertising opportunity.
The reach of the interview will surely surpass the reach of the big yearly advertising show called the Super Bowl. On the other hand, Oprah's interview will not result in a useful reach for every advertiser. Not every brand is known worldwide or uses the same brand name, logo and positioning strategy in each country. Another downside is that in contrast to the Super Bowl, advertisers had little time to plan their ads since Oprah did not announce it months before. Still, it seems as if most ad spots have been sold at premium prices (see e.g. Huffington Post).

A journalist asked me to estimate the total ad revenue of this two-part interview. Here is my conservative estimate:
- The inverview will total more than two hours (There is a 1.5 hour show today and another one tomorrow that will at least take 1 hour I guess). Oprah said she did not want to cut the material to a one hour interview because it was too rich (pun added and intended...)
- Assume, conservatively, that there will be 15 minutes of ads per hour, which equals 30 ads in the typical 30 second format.
- Now for the biggest assumption: how much does one ad cost? Super Bowl ads go for about $ 3million each. The most expensive ads in a regular US show are those for Sunday Night Football at an estimated $545,142 (source Adage.com). Given the problems mentioned earlier (short notice to produce targeted ads; possibly not a useful reach worldwide), OWN will not be able to charge at Super Bowl prices. On the other hand, OWN would be stupid to sell at the mere price of sports program (no personal depreciation on my part but the Lance confessions have a much broader audience). If we conservatively assume $750,000 as the minimum price for an ad in Oprah's Next Chapter interview of Lance (probably a serious underestimation)...

... than the total ad revenue should be at least 2,5 x 30 x $.75 million = ~ $56 million.

That is not bad for a network that reports $329 million as their quarterly ad income one year ago (source). And of course, the interview will also generate other income due to it being sold to other stations worldwide. And, in the mid to long term, OWN surely hopes the interview will generate some more audience for other content of the network thus increasing their ad revenue in the long run as well.

I'll be curious to learn about the real revenue if it will be disclosed.

[Note: Edited for a stupid miscalculation]

Consumers’ expected quality of high discount daily deal services

Below is a guest post by Sanne Meussen, who studied consumer responses to daily deal websites in her master's thesis (which I supervised). Apart from the to-be-expected preference for higher discounts on such websites, she also found some evidence that there is a hidden danger to these high discounts...

Even though Groupon has lost $10 billion of its market value in less than one year, the number of subscribers is still growing. Apparently, consumers are still interested in high discount deals on daily deal websites. Why wouldn’t they, if they can eat a first-class meal at a local restaurant with a 75% discount? Groupon even points out: ‘we want each Groupon purchase to feel too good to be true’.

Food advertising and pledging not to target children

I wrote a commentary on the topic, following the Belgian Pledge of main food advertisers not to target children under 12 anymore. The commentary appeared on the blog of the KU Leuven Institute for Media Studies [in Dutch]: http://instituteformediastudies.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/kinderreclame-en-ongezonde-voeding-de-belgian-pledge/

Where's the revenue in Google Glasses?

The Google Glasses preview seems great. It seems feasible, releases are expected pretty soon and there is some intuitive appeal to the idea (and some intuitive questions as well). If you have not seen the preview, you should.

A number of parodies, of course, already exist and one is remarkably interesting and touches upon important marketing and revenue issues.

Schizophrenia: an online marketing disease

Two snippets of online marketing facts got some attention recently and, when tied together, they make the job of a well-done integrated online marketing campaign a work of geniuses, or schizophrenics. Well, in fact, it is not just snippets. We are talking about major moves of the two major online marketing platforms, namely Google and Facebook.

Epilogue to the DearMedia study on youth and TV

After the publication of the full report I mentioned in my previous post (which, in academic terms would not be considered a full report) and the comment by one of the authors (Jo Caudron) you'll find below that post, it is my duty to get back to the results and discuss them. 

What you hear about research

Academia is often criticized for being a too slow innovation force, with research being either too fundamental and abstract or specific but outdated by the time it gets published. This is certainly the case in more applied disciplines like marketing communication and advertising research. While I will not contest this observation, I will try to make clear in this blogpost that the slowness of academia should not be replaced by mediocre research from non-academic research agencies. Of course, everybody is free to conduct research but non-academic research is rapidly gaining impact in society and this could be troublesome if it is treated just as if it was a piece of research that went through the complete scientific publication process.

Approach - Avoidance: deep traces of attitudes towards media devices and their contents

Why is it that interactive TV is not really a success whereas second screen applications seem to be doing OK? This question has puzzled me for a while and the answer is not an easy one, I think. In this post I will try to shed some light on an answer that only accounts for a very small proportion of the total findings. It just deals with cool and unconscious processes, things that get extra credit in my own view on things. This partial answer has to do with very deep behavioral processes: approach and avoidance. 

Old school marketing revival on the way: Package and product quality

After the advertising clutter paradox in the nineties and nillies, the advent of mobile phone and tablet technology has been heralded as the holy grail of modern advertising. These new technologies indeed guarantee new and improved communications between brands and customers. They also make sure that at the conscious level, there should be a great deal of integrity put into the marketing efforts with these new channels. As a customer, we should therefore welcome these applications, I believe. These modern technologies also have their impact on more traditional advertising. As I suggest below, this is true for traditional above-the-line advertising as well as for the most basic of all marketing communication tools: the product and its packaging.