Quizno’s has done it again… The popular sub shop has unleashed their newest creepy ad campaign, featuring singing kittens. The ads, which attempt to promote Quizno’s value menu, include three singing kittens dressed in marching band attire that annoyingly yell “five-four-three” to the tune of Three Blind Mice. The thought of  kittens and a sub sandwich just don’t mix well for me. It makes me wonder: Who is Quizno’s target audience?

Unfortunately, these ads are a step up from their “Spongmonkey ads,” which featured defective-looking rodent creatures with jacked up human teeth and crazy eyes. The little spongmonkeys sport a top hat and strum their claws on a guitar – all this while singing “We love the subs!”

Is their target audience stoners? I have never eaten at Quizno’s, ONLY because every time I see one, I think of these rats prancing all over my sub sandwich.

I remember when I was young and started elementary school. My back to school supply list consisted of paper, pencils, crayons,
markers, glue, scissors and folders.

We are definitely on the dawn of a new era, the back to school list has now  developed into a Super Supply List.
These things were never on my list before:
tissues
hand sanitizer
freezer zipper bags
highlighters
steno pads
individually wrapped candy
clorox wipes
paper towels
"activity fee"

WOW!!!! Things have definitely changed!!!
For new parents, my suggestion is to keep an ongoing mental list for these items, especially for when they go on sale!

This was an interesting time for me to step back and analyze where I buy my kids' supplies and what each big box's marketing has done to influence my buying habits. In no particular order:

meijer
"Back to School Price Drop. It's baaaaack!"
This one's simple - meijer is the closest to my home.  Word of mouth among my mommy circle is that they have the best bargains by far! They are also offering a Back to School Sweepstakes.

Wal-Mart
"Get A+ Savings on Back to School Essentials"
I consider Wal-Mart my old faithful.  There's always one nearby. You can also order online and get free shipping on uniforms.

Dollar General Store
"Fall 2010 Back to School. Get Smart Savings"
I have been a proud supporter of DG Back to School supplies since I was a first grader in 1981.  Some folks have a tendency to snub DG, but I don't. When it comes to simple things like paper towels and tissues, you can buy name brand and save money.  Just toss the bright yellow bag when you get home.

Target
"Check off your list"
Why do I go to Target? Actually, I don't. My daughters have wonderful grandparents who consider back to school shopping an annual event and it always starts at Target. I tend to label them as the upscale shopping source. They have great sales and a great selection of what my daughters refer to as "sassy items."

One of the things brand strategists run up against from time to time is the issue of so-called “re-branding.” Most of the time what’s actually being requested is a brand makeover: a trim, a little freshening up, but nothing much more than a few cosmetic improvements.

Every so often though, there’s a request for something more radical, and here I’m speaking of a true re-brand: the invention of a whole new identity. What’s so difficult about a re-brand is that it’s like asking your best friend to not only to dye his hair and get plastic surgery, but to change his personality as well.

It’s a nigh-impossible task. Assuming for a moment it can be accomplished, there’s the further problem of convincing the rest of the world. For what too many brand architects tend to forget is that brands, while they may be company assets, are only partly company property. The true owners of brands are consumers, to say nothing of employees, vendors, investors…even competitors.

That’s what makes a major brand overhaul such a challenge, and why a true re-branding can take years and hundreds of thousands — or millions — of dollars accomplish.

No wonder that when a major brand alteration becomes necessary, more companies opt to pull the plug on their old selves, reorganize, and make a fresh start under a new name and identity. For in the end, while it is possible to change yourself, you can’t really run from yourself. Consumers are smart people.

It is for these reasons that BP and Toyota — this year’s brand catastrophes — are going to be so interesting to watch over the next twelve months. Will they disappear and go into the brand equivalent of the Federal Witness Protection Program? Or will they show up at the family reunion wearing a wig and dark sunglasses? Only time will tell.

But that’s just the way they like it.

Even the company’s website proudly proclaims:

“Dr. Martens have always been different. No other brand has been mutated, customized, f$@%ed up and freaked out like DM’s. Without asking or being able to stop it. It happened to them. They were just fascinated bystanders on a journey that has raced through every crevice of subculture, every twist and turn of youthful creativity and now, here, with a generation who have always had email, mp3s and downloads, it is as relevant and vibrant as ever.”

So perhaps it comes as no surprise that to celebrate their 50th birthday, Dr. Martens wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary.  The company asked 10 artists to create their version of a cult classic track that represents the spirit of the people who’ve worn DM’s over the past 50 years. Vanessa Marzaroli, a director at Blind, was invited to participate. Vanessa was asked to direct a video that did not include talent, but was given no other creative parameters or rules. So what did Blind and Vanessa come up with? A stunningly beautiful video that will surely give you goosebumps:

Does the video capture and represent Dr. Martens as the unique, remarkable, and extraordinary brand it is? Well, that’s certainly up for interpretation. But the haunting music, Cinematic Orchestra’s version of the classic “Lilac Wine” (made popular by early 90s crooner, Jeff Buckley), combined with the exquisite “moving visual poetry” is certainly poignant and beautiful to look at.

This past week, a few of us here in the copywriting bullpen got into a discussion on the state of advertising. It was Angela T., our social media “Buzz Builder” who started it, calling to our attention a set of banners on the Spirit Airlines website. The banners were attempting to find humor in the gulf oil spill, something that isn’t even remotely funny, less so to Angela who’s originally from the coast.

Yet it got me thinking about what seems to me to be a decline in advertising generally. The industry is sliding away from clever selling and towards merely vulgar attention-getting. Obviously, a certain stripe of ad man (a stripe like me) has been railing against big budget “entertainment”-type advertising for decades. Yet I think something different has been happening in the industry lately. Traditional mass-media agencies are flailing, throwing everything they possibly can at the wall, hoping something will stick. How else to explain the Dockers’ bewildering “I Wear No Pants” campaign?

What we’re seeing, I think, is the traditional agency trying to stay relevant at a time when selling is declining as a marketing activity. To be sure, buying hasn’t stopped. People still love to buy. What they increasingly don’t like is being sold, hence the overall reduction in selling as it’s traditionally been defined, and the rise of branding.

No wonder so many traditional ad agencies are at a creative crisis point, racking their brains trying to come up with ever-more outrageous methods for garnering attention, under the mistaken assumption that what they’re doing constitutes branding. The reality is that any attention isn’t necessarily good attention for a brand (just ask BP). The dinosaur agencies of yesterday had better wise up, because the number of opportunities left to use the old tried-and-true mass media techniques is shrinking, fast. Meantime, creative, cost-effective opportunities for companies to differentiate and build brand continue to proliferate.

As a long-time marketer, I know which side of this particular fence I’d rather be on.

Few things in this industry are more challenging than getting the public to pay attention to PSAs. We can market products, goods and services until the cows come home but it takes a truly talented team to create a PSA that gets noticed.

The Embrace Life PSA, created by the Sussex Safer Road Partnership with the help of Take2 Films, is one such PSA that left me speechless.

Maybe it’s the drama, maybe it’s the slow motion (most things are better in slow motion), maybe it’s because I’m not being sold something other than an idea or maybe I’m feeling sentimental today. No matter what it is, this one really spoke to me – and it didn’t speak only to me but also the 8,620,572 other people that have viewed it on YouTube.

Not only did this team get their message across that one small decision in your day, like choosing to wear your seatbelt, can affect so many, they did it with few words on a low budget. Without saying very much, they say a lot. They grab the public’s attention by tapping into their emotions without showing them something graphic or disturbing.

It just goes to show that it doesn’t take a big production or a lot of words to get your point across. With the right message, passion and teamwork, anything can get the attention you desire—even PSAs.

And yes, I always wear my seatbelt.

OK, so you're British Petroleum and you've destroyed habitats in the Gulf of Mexico.  And in the process are killing birds, businesses and communities.  Yeah, you blew it on the whole safe drilling and reaction plan things.  But how are you handling the PR nightmare 100 times the magnitude of anything the John Wilkes Booth family ever dreamed of.

And stupid, insensitive comments like "I want my life back," from embattled BP CEO Tony Hayward don't score points with the Gulf locals, shareholders or the rest of the world.

Sure, it's an uphill battle.  But I've seen some bright spots.  Certainly, setting up the $20 billion damage claims fund -- shakedown or not -- was a positive if unavoidable first step.  Then I saw this commercial last night that made me think BP really does care.  I guess that's the objective.

I even read a letter to the editor in the Courier-Journal  this week encouraging people to buy gas from BP!  True.  The writer's rationale was that if BP goes out of business, who's going to pay for the clean up?  Made sense to me.

As of today, I'd give BP an F-minus for environmentalism and a C-plus in post-disaster marketing.  For the long term, I'm afraid the picture is bleak for both BP and the Gulf.  Though, I think BP has the better chance of coming out of this mess.  And, as a marketer, I must admire their efforts to keep a positive spin on things.  They have little choice.

What do YOU think?  We'd love to see comments from UnderCurrent readers on BPs handling of the Gulf Crisis.   There's enough fodder here for a wide spectrum on opinions on the PR/marketing aspect of this.  Heck, even congress has taken up -- believe it or not -- polar positions on it (pick it up at 6:00 into the show).  So please, chime in yourself!

Being an Account Coordinator, working day in and day out with clients, my job revolves around service. My focus is on fulfilling customer needs and I take that responsibility seriously. Which means that when I leave the office I don’t stop thinking about service, it’s on my mind wherever I go: to lunch, to the mall, pretty much anywhere I see a transaction taking pace.

That said, let me tell you that I haven’t been especially pleased by most of the service I’ve been witnessing lately. Take the sandwich place I went to for lunch last week. There I was in line, about three people back from the counter, when the sandwich maker stuck his head out from behind the folks in front of me and demanded to know what sort of sandwich I wanted. I thought it was rude. A few minutes later when I got to the front of the line, the fixin’s girl wasn’t any nicer. She bullied me to tell her what I wanted, then threw the veggies on and pushed the sandwich along the production line.

So alright, you might say, that’s a sandwich shop. But would you believe the same thing happened when I was shopping for vendors for my wedding reception? Most of these folks I dealt with — from the florists to the decorators to the caterers — made me feel as though I was putting them out by offering to give them my money.

All of these experiences got me thinking: these days, marketing is about a whole lot more than websites, newspaper ads and radio commercials. These days, it’s the lowest paid, front line employees that are on the leading edge of marketing and branding, not a marketing director in some corner office. If the people who are performing the actual customer contact don’t treat customers right, it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the boardroom, because those customers are never coming back.

I haven’t done a formal survey, but my own sense is that more and more retailers are forgetting how important it is to market on the micro level. And that’s a pity, because that’s where the most crucial part of the marketing game is played.

I don’t know a lot about baby strollers. In fact, I don’t know anything about baby strollers. But if I needed one, I could easily be persuaded to buy a Britax stroller after seeing their new campaign.

The ads feature nude women, presumably mothers, holding and/or cradling their babies. This scene transitions to a stroller holding the same baby in the same position. The ads, created by New York-based agency Gotham Incorporated, seek to prove that Britax strollers closely replicate how a mother would hold her baby: safe, comfortable and secure.

Personally, I think Britax is taking an exciting approach to a sometimes dull product. The ads are beautiful and striking but also a little edgy and arty… just like motherhood. Take a peek and judge for yourself!

I think the main reason more companies don’t put a priority on brand building is because they see it as just another line item in a marketing budget: just another expenditure, one that won’t have any measurable impact on the bottom line.

The reality is that brands are more than just the sum total of logos and ad slogans. When they’re properly managed, they become assets for companies, assets that can and do deliver real revenue. Let’s look at just a few of the ways that a strong brand impacts a bottom line.

- Products issued by strong brands command premium prices. Consider how much a cup of Starbucks coffee costs relative to a cup from the corner diner and you’ll get what I mean.

- A strong brand creates loyalty, which means more repeat purchases and increased profitability for the lifetime of the customer.

- A strong brand gives you negotiating power. Think about the leverage a company like Walmart is able to exert over its channel partners in exchange for the privilege of doing business with the king of retail. Need I say more?

- A strong brand helps you attract and retain the best people, maintain high employee morale, and create a culture that fosters excellence.

Add up these revenue-generating, cost-saving and asset-building benefits and you can see why leading companies place such a premium on building and protecting their brands — and why, increasingly, companies are being valued on the overall strength of their brands. Kinda makes you want to work on yours a little, doesn’t it?