I'm not sure the Musketeers had support through product purchase in mind with their infamous phrase but that's just what a lot of companies are hanging their hats on these days to sell more product and be socially responsible.

One-for-one companies are gaining more and more attention for selling a product and giving away a product. They are not-for-profit companies, with the most notable being Tom's Shoes. The premise is simple, for every new pair of shoes you buy a new pair is given to a child in need, transforming the buyer into a benefactor. 

Blanket America has a similar model, based on the notion of "What if the greatest economy in human history matched what it consumed with what it donated?" The model,  buy a quilt with a specific "patch" attached to it and it's non-profit subsidiary will donate a plain white blanket to someone in need. The owner's goal in to give away 1 million blankets in the winter of 2009.

Differentiating through social integrity is becoming an increasingly common - and often quite successful - brand strategy. Is this another form of cause marketing to sell more product, philanthropy or a genuine attempt to be socially/community/globally responsible? Let us know your thoughts.

Jack Dorsey, @jack, the creator of Twitter, is actively involved in a product that could give larger credit card payment processing systems a run for their money.

Square is a credit card payment system and reader that inserts into the audio input jack of your iPhone, iPad, nexus or Android device. The systems allows you to interact and transact with customers anywhere in your store safely and securely. The processing fees are lower than what the big names charge and there's no contract, merchant account required, setup, monthly or minimum fees.

Since the company's announcement in December 2009 they've had some delays with hardware production problems and underwriting problems in regards to risk of chargeback and fraud. I'd look for it to be ready late 2010.

There's a new company in Holland called BrandNEW.



BrandNEW manages a chain of retail locations in shopping malls, etc., that can be leased for short periods of time. Their thought is that, sometimes, you want a convenient place where consumers can come get their hands on a new product, but you don't necessarily want a long-term retail location. BrandNEW will let you lease one of their locations for a few weeks or months. It looks like you can brand them however you want, and make use of the healthy dose of interactive technology installed in each to provide an immersive, compelling brand experience for visitors.

It's a pretty cool idea. I wonder when it'll catch on in the States?

Check out www.brandnewstores.com.

The good people at GoodGuide.com describe their site as "the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social impacts of the products in your home." And by compiling virtually all available information relating to the packaged goods you purchase and the companies that make them, they're not kidding. The site is still in Beta, but already shows huge promise, as evidenced by its steadily growing traffic over the past year since its launch.

GoodGuide rates the products you buy on several scales, including their impact on your health, their impact on the environment, and their manufacturer's impact on society (based on hiring practices, etc.). These and other scores, including user reviews, are averaged into a global GoodGuide Rating, allowing users to see, at a glance, which products are the most popular and socially responsible within a given category. And all this content is generated, mind you, without the slightest involvement on the part of the products' manufacturers themselves.

Marketing efforts be damned, this site is like Consumer Reports on steroids, and we think it'll catch on.


There's been lots of talk lately about how the future of marketing will be largely in the hands of consumers and their ability to recommend purchases to each other based on the growing amount of information available to them beyond official marketing messages. Here's a concrete example of what that might look like.

But where does that leave you, o Advertiser? How do you market a product to consumers who largely avoid marketing messages? What kind of brand strategy takes into account and reaches these consumers who are essentially "going rogue" when it comes to traditional marketing practices? Is it "social?" Probably. Is it radically different from what you're doing now? Most likely. Does this mean the death of advertising? Absolutely not.

If you sell something, see how your products measure up at GoodGuide.com. And if the answer is "not very well," let the good people of Meyer & Wallis help you improve your brand's image. With more than 40 years of success behind us, we know a thing or two about reaching a changing world with relevant, effective advertising.

As early as the 17th century, solicitors in Europe would leave behind a little card bearing their contact info. More than four hundred years later, we're still doing the same thing. But with business people being far more connected these days, we tend to get a lot of business cards. I know I have to clean out my wallet every couple months and decide what to do with all the new business cards I've collected.

Well, you don't have to work at an advertising agency to think that this is pretty cool:


This is the Poken Pulse. It's a 2GB USB flash drive, but it's also a wireless contact exchange format. By simply placing two of these little guys together, they automatically exchange a digital business card with the person you've just met. You simply connect it to your computer to view (and sync) your new contacts' information.

The company that makes the Poken Pulse is young, and this is still a pretty new product. But at only €29.99, these things could really take off. And I think my wallet would thank me if they did.

Advergirl is one savvy marketer. On her blog, she's recently been doing a series called "The Media Crisis." Here's a link to Part One. Be sure to navigate forward to read parts 2, 3 and 4.

These are interesting times to be in advertising. As a Milwaukee Ad agency with 40+ years of history, we can remember the advertising renaissance of the 1960s, and the the effect the internet first had back in the 1990s. Now, we'd like to be around for another 40 years or so, and that will involve navigating another sea change in the way advertising is done. Advergirl is on to something here. Read it, and comment below if you'd like.

Milwaukee has an interesting newspaper history. Though many might consider us a "small" city, Milwaukee had two rival newspapers for decades — The Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel. They merged a few years ago, and the Brew City no longer has two papers vying for our attention.

But that's neither here nor there when it comes to these interesting infographics from Mint.com. I guess the amount of information Mint has aggregated to pull these stats together makes this one of the most comprehensive views of the newspaper industry so far:



Okay. It looks like 24 of the nation's top 25 papers are DOWN in circulation. (Good job, Wall Street Journal.) But this graph didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know.

Then I saw this part:


Sure, in this graph you can clearly see a sharper decline in circulation starting in around 2004. But the most interesting thing — to me, anyway — is the fact that newspaper circulation basically peaked in the mid 1980s.

The 1980s!?!

Alright. I'll allow that the internet has taken a healthy bite out of print news in the last few years. But since 1984?? I think not.

I think newspapers have something besides the internet to blame lower circulation on. I think it's a marketing problem. How do you sell a newspaper to a generation that grew up with more alternative sources for news than any before it?

You know, these days, everyone is clamoring to brand themselves as an internet ad agency. But the internet is doing fine. Looks like print media is the one that needs some help, and we've got some ideas. Meyer & Wallis has been a turnaround specialist since our inception, and we think we know how to improve newspaper circulation. More on this in the future. In the mean time, check out the whole infographic here.

I like beer. In fact, Meyer & Wallis likes beer. While our intake falls far short of the kind you see on Mad Men, we've been known to wrap up a busy workweek with a round of ice cold "art supplies." Clever, we know.

And it makes sense, too. Meyer & Wallis started over 40 years ago here in Milwaukee — home to four nationally recognized breweries at the time: Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz and Miller.

But where are they now? Schlitz has just recently returned to brewing in Milwaukee, but is owned by Pabst, now headquartered in Illinois. Blatz is being brewed once again by Miller, but Miller has merged with Coors, and, you may remember if you follow marketing blogs like this one, has moved their marketing headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago. Yup, of the original four independent, local breweries mentioned above, not one remains. The largest domestic brewery left in the US? Sam Adams.

Now I'm sure these breweries have good reasons for merging and moving as they have, and I'm also sure that product quality, not profit, remains at the top of their lists. (Wink.) But how have consumers responded to the mass production of beer that's happened over the last few years. Well, have you been in a Whole Foods lately?
 


Sure, there's a section for your Big Name Beers, but a gloriously massive amount of space is devoted to smaller, local, craft beers. Why? Because they taste better. Because they manage to get something right that the bigger breweries can't.

What does this have to do with Meyer & Wallis?

There's this assumption that bigger is better, even with Ad Agencies. Bigger means more resources, more talent, more sway. Or so it seems at first. But really, when it comes to Ad Agencies, bigger means that your account is only one of dozens. It means if your ad budget isn't in the tens of millions, your campaign gets crafted by inexperienced interns. It means you get to pay for all that a big agency says they have at their disposal, while getting none of the personal attention required to leverage those benefits for your brand. To revive the metaphor, it'd be like paying $5 to drink a bottle of Schlitz when you could have a bottle of Lakefront East Side Dark Lager for $3.50. You haven't heard of it? It's delicious.

Meyer & Wallis is a small, independent, local ad agency with offices in Milwaukee and Indianapolis. We aren't owned by another company. We have relationships with the media going back decades. Our experience in retail marketing management is second to none. Our UK style account planning approach means every campaign is carefully researched and and planned and executed by the same team of people, utilizing a proprietary planning process. We come to know the unique needs of each of our clients as only a small agency can.

So if you're sick of the watered-down taste of your current ad campaign, and yearn for the full-bodied, unique flavor that only comes from a local agency, give us a call. We're the ad agency that made Milwaukee famous.

One of our clients recently unveiled a new campaign that we're really proud of, and I though I'd share a bit of it with you.

Carpet town is a local retailer that may have started as a carpet store years ago, but today, they have one of the best selections of carpet, wood and vinyl flooring, and window treatments in the area. And yet, their name — Carpet Town — is so well known, they're hesitant to change it. Understandable. So we wanted to communicate to consumers that their trusted source for Carpet is also a great place to buy other home decorating products at similarly great prices with similarly great service. How'd we do that? Here's a couple examples:


A mirror graphic in the bathroom


We decorated the exposed elevator shaft in the lobby of this mall with curtains and a "rug" floor graphic.

This has been a fun project for us. In store media is one thing... In MALL media is another. It's been fun to work with the unique opportunities Mayfair mall has given us. More on this campaign later this week.

Well, well, well... A couple weeks ago, I wrote about  KFC's new grilled chicken options. This, from the restaurant chain that has been systematically removing any hint of deep fryery from their branding for over a decade. Given other fast food chains' recent and similar moves, my hopes were not high for this one. Still, even a fried squirrel finds a grilled nut sometimes.

The launch of grilled chicken has been KFC's most successful product launch to date.

Well, I for one can't wait for the KFC Chicken Salad.

You know, advertising is an interesting thing. There aren't really any laws that determine who can buy ad space in a magazine, on television, on a billboard... anything. It's all fair game, as long as you have the money. Usually, that naturally limits advertisers to companies with a product to sell who might grow their business through an investment in advertising.

But I've often wondered, aside from the odd "Becky — will you marry me?" billboard, has an individual ever run an ad campaign just cause they had something to say and the money to make it happen? Well, the answer is yes.

This message has been brought to you by Mr. Keith Mills, a wealthy British investor, who reminds 
financial institutions everywhere not to piss off wealthy British investors.

Now that our nation's Independence Day is out of the way, your thoughts have probably turned to upcoming events throughout the rest of the year. Like the rest of summer, for example. If you're real Type-A, maybe you're already planning your Labor Day celebration. Maybe.

Then again, Sears and Kmart would like you to know that now's the perfect time to get ready for Christmas.

That's right.

Yesterday, 372 Sears stores put out a limited selection of Christmas gear. Also, Sears.com and Kmart.com launched dedicated Christmas areas on their websites.

No need to check your calendar — Christmas still falls on the 25th of December this year. It's just that sales are slow right now, and retailers all over are losing money. Sears and Kmart know that holiday shopping is a relative sure thing, so they've decided to start letting people make holiday purchases now. They've also reintroduced the layaway program: start slowly paying for your Christmas stuff today, and take it home by December. Sears and Kmart supplement their summer sales, and you get that herd of festive sheep you've always wanted. Everybody wins!

Considering the flack retailers (and radio stations) seem to get each year with the competition to be the "first" to market with Christmas stuff, this is a bold move, indeed. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures, but is this really the best way to increase revenue in a down economy? Aren't Sears and Kmart essentially stealing from their future revenues? It seems to me that the soundest retail marketing strategy would be to make the most of every retail season, not borrowing from future ones. That's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Maybe what they really need is to call one of the most experienced retail advertising agencies around. And clearly, I'm not talking about Young and Rubicam.

Read more about this story here.

The first filmed advertisement aired in 1906, for Sunlight Soap (a Lever product).



Compelling, isn't it?

Sometimes being an internet ad agency isn't about flashy animated websites. Sometimes the most effective interactive media is the easiest to find, and that has more to do with playing by Google's rules than outside-the-box creative. Yes, sometimes the most important tweaks to your website can seem downright ho-hum. But they make a world of difference. There's a nice summary of the kind of things you need to think about in order to make your website "more than just a website," as we like to say. Check it out here.

It doesn't take a complete redesign to make your website work harder for you. Talk to Meyer & Wallis about ways we can help you improve your existing site today.

Meyer & Wallis is prepared to award $1 million to anyone who can correctly guess the product this spot is advertising before the reveal at the end:




Okay, not really. Especially since I can't figure out how to disable YouTube's displaying the video's name. But this is quite the set-up. Do you think it works?

Though we're but a local Milwaukee ad agency, we've had several supermarkets as clients over the years — located throughout the midwest and beyond. You could call retail marketing one of our core competencies.

Anyway, many of them offer private label brands along side the local and national ones. As private labels are less expensive by nature, the recession has caused many to consider them. And a new study indicates that 91% of people who have recently switched to store brands because of the economy think they'll make the switch permanent.

WOW.

now if only supermarkets actively advertised their private labels.

Meyer & Wallis has set up shop in some pretty cool spaces over the years. Our first office was in the oldest building on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. Twenty years and three offices later, we find ourselves on the corner of Jackson and Mason.

This is the first space we've had that we've been able to build to suit. It's pretty cool. With in-house facilities for everything from media buying to broadcast production, we really are a full service advertising agency.

The first space you enter off the elevators is our reception area.



Behind the hiding receptionist, and below our target logo, you can see a few of the awards we've won over the years.

There are more of these. In fact, we have a couple "walls of intimidation" throughout the place.



And another:



In fact, we've won so many awards, they can be found throughout the agency, anywhere there's shelf space. Like here, with our software manuals:



I'm not trying to brag. It's just that, well, we've won a lot of awards for our work. Anyway...

Our walls are covered in galvanized steel on which we can display our work however we wish.



We've also been known to display some personal "Flair" outside our offices, as well.



The floor really feels like a creative space. Even our common area feels fun and inviting. On the back wall: the famous Meyer & Wallis Christmas Card Retrospective.



And, finally, throughout the agency you'll find these unique displays representing beliefs that our company has been built on:



They remind us why we do what we do, and why we do it better than most.

If you'd ever like to get a closer look at the place, Bob Meyer loves giving tours. Just a warning: he'll probably want to talk about your advertising, too.

There was a time when Microsoft was spoken of like the Colosseum in Rome: Huge, stable, somehow existing outside of time and reality. We all had and loved Windows ('cause Macs sucked back then anyway) and we all used Internet Explorer, the browser that destroyed Netscape Navigator, its seemingly insurmountable predecessor.

But that was then. This is 2009. Apple has doubled their market share. Internet Explorer is steadily losing market share to multiple competitors. And Windows fans have had to spend more time defending than enjoying Vista. Last, but not least, Microsoft's multiple attempts to unseat Google as king of search have failed, each in its own spectacular way.

Is the empire crumbling? Microsoft would have you think not. This week, they released their newest search product: Bing. As in, "just 'bing' it." Early reviews have been both positive and negative, which is somewhat expected as they make some last-minute tweaks. But the price of beating Google, the indisputable leader in internet search, is a hefty price indeed. Microsoft's marketing budget for the campaign introducing Bing is estimated at $80 to $100 million. In addition to traditional media, Microsoft is paying to place Bing in a handful of prime time TV shows, hoping if you see Jack Bauer Bing something, you might want to Bing, too. And it still may not work.

How often in history has the underdog, even a superior underdog, not been able to come from behind only because of the head start the leader has? The pricing of taking on Google is a hundred million dollars, and even when you've got the financial and technological resources of Microsoft, there's no guarantee your efforts will pay off.

So the moral is: don't let your brand fall behind in a category you want to be a major player in — not even for a moment, because it will cost you much more to regain that market share later on than it would to simply hang onto it. For example: have you tried Bing yet?

Several years ago, there was a supermarket chain here in Milwaukee called Kohl's. It was a higher end food store, and dominated the local market with about 45% market share. That's far more than any one of its competitors. 

The company that ran Kohl's food stores had also recently opened some department stores, also under the name Kohl's. Long story short, ownership of all the Kohl's brands changed hands, and the new management was much more interested in the department stores they had acquired than the food stores. So they started running the food stores almost as an afterthought, devoting no resources or attention to them at all. Within months, market share had plummeted from 45% to about 12%, and public opinion of Kolh's food stores was downright abysmal. People were actually angry over what had happened to the chain.

About this time, Meyer & Wallis (R.L. Meyer Advertising at that time) was asked to help. Bob Meyer's pitch was pretty simple: "You've lost the trust of consumers because you've mislead them. You've changed a store they've come to know and love without any forewarning, and you will continue to hemorrhage customers until you start telling them the truth. I've got a plan that will save this company, but for it to work you have to tell your customers the absolute truth from now on." They agreed.

The first TV spot that aired was much like GM's. It was an apology; an acknowledgement of the trust lost and the expectations unfulfilled. "But give us a couple weeks," the ad asked, "and we'll show you a whole new kind of super market."

Over the next couple weeks, and with our help, Kohl's reevaluated their practices and prices. They got back in touch with what had once made them so popular, and redesigned their stores around these strengths.

The stores reopened as a new TV ad began to air. It rebranded the stores "Kohl's II," and promised a new shopping experience to consumers, combining the high quality they remembered with low prices that might surprise them. Within weeks, Kohl's food store's market share climbed back up to about 21% — nowhere near the 45% they once enjoyed, but almost double where they had been. (As I talked this over with Bob Meyer, he was quick to make an important point here: it's much easier to hang onto market share than to regain it. Getting Kohl's back to 45% market share could have easily taken years, because repairing a brand is a slow process.) After losing money for 10 straight months (sometimes millions per month), Kohl's food stores were able to buy a nearby grocery chain with the sudden and unexpected revenue the campaign helped generate.

Alas, this story does not end well. As happens all too often, management at Kohl's was quicker to credit themselves for the stores' turnaround than our marketing campaign, and cut ties with our agency in favor of a marketing direction they could feel more in charge of.

After losing money year after year, all Kohl's food stores were finally closed in 2003. Nowhere near 12% of the market missed them.

Anyway, there are two morals here: (1) Meyer & Wallis are turnaround specialists. We excel at identifying the unique claims a struggling business can make within their industry and helping them make them in a cost effective yet highly creative way, with the ultimate goal of getting results. Time after time since the Kohl's campaign, we have proven our ability to do this. We'd love to talk with you about it. And yet, (2) No campaign, no matter how effective, can save a brand that isn't willing to match the claims it is making. If a company makes its own advertising claims out to be lies, it has no one to blame but itself if the public picks up on the inconsistencies.

We'll all find out soon enough if GM can match its marketing claims.

I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of money that you've seen a video of Susan Boyle's first performance on Britain's Got Talent. It's basically the most popular internet video in history, with an untouchable 220 million views since April.

But the company that produces Britain's Got Talent and owns the rights to her performances has struggled to make any profit off of her popularity on the internet. Read the interesting article in the New York Times here.

Interactive Media is a funny thing. We all know the internet is hugely popular, and the place more and more people turn to for fresh content. But they rarely want to pay for it. What to do?

As has been discussed on this blog before, there isn't really a formula for making a viral video. We've seen more than one internet ad agency claim that they can virtually guarantee a viral hit. Even if that's true, ensuring that the effort somehow pays off for the advertiser also matters. A lot.

Meyer & Wallis is a full service advertising agency with the interactive know-how to create hugely "viral" campaigns — even before the help of the internet! (click here) But we also have 40+ years of marketing experience that helps us keep the success and growth of your brand as our top priority. Contact us to find out more.