A few weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about the growing number of "older" users on Facebook. All of a sudden, the fastest growing demographic on the site that used to be exclusively for college students had become adults in their 40s and above. Facebook has clearly been tweaking their feature set and user interface to be — how do I say this? — more approachable to the computer skill level of, say, my mother. Facebook probably thought this was great news; they've been trying to figure out how to make more money through advertising, and adding a new demographic certainly can't hurt.

Right?

Well, looky here:



Look at the growth broken down by "Current Enrollment," at the bottom of the chart. Turns out, kids of all ages dislike having their parents and grandparents commenting on photos of an evening spent bar hopping, or reading their "wall," or, God forbid, friending their friends. In it's effort to be all inclusive, Facebook might have alienated the demographic on which it built its business. And if the kids leave, will the parents stick around?

We've often worked with retail clients who are convinced the only way to grow their business is to please everybody they can possibly reach. But that's just not possible. If you try to be everything to everybody, you're going to wind up spread too thin and you risk losing any kind of discernable identity. Our favorite retail marketing strategy is to identify a client's key strengths, and directly target the consumers who'd be most interested in those strengths. Why direct your retail advertising toward consumers who, based on their needs and preferences, really wouldn't chose your store over the one they already prefer?

In their bid to appeal to everyone, Facebook may see a new startup do to them what they did to MySpace not long ago. Sometimes, it's best not to please everybody, as long as you can be okay with that.

Chart found via Read Write Web.

Can a static ad be "conversational?" How do you feel after the Pringles brand after clicking on this banner for a while?



If you think it's pretty clever, you're not alone. It won gold at Cannes last week. As online advertising strategies go, this one feels pretty unique. I can't think of the last time I paid more than half a second of attention to a banner ad. What do you think?

There's been a fresh wave of line extensions amid this recession (Kentucky GRILLED chicken, anyone?), but that still doesn't mean it's a good idea. While reason would seem to dictate that if your category's business is shrinking, you should expand your wares, sound retail marketing insight dictates otherwise, as this excellent article over at Ries' Pieces articulates. Check it out.

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



Compelling, isn't it?

Talk about media buying! This is the top winner in the outdoor category at the recent Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Quite the provocative headline, eh? Read the unique campaign's full story here.

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?

Recently released photos of the Ahmadinejad Rally in Iran were photoshopped to make the crouds appear larger.

I wonder if the state media has a license for their copy of CS4?

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.

Check out this recent spot from AMV BBDO in London. Is your brand so strong you could REMOVE IT ENTIRELY from your ads and still get your point across? Check it out:

Conan O'Brien has weighed in on the usefulness of Twitter.

Whether or not you agree, it's pretty funny.

 

With about as many detractors as supporters, it'll be interesting to see where Twitter is headed.

A few weeks back, I mused about what it must be like to be Starbucks right now. Born in an era when being able to afford a $4 cup of coffee was an indication of status, but finding itself in an era when spending $4 on coffee seems a bit imprudent, Starbucks is out of its economic element.

But this week, and not a moment too late, Starbucks' brew has been named the "#1 fast food coffee" by Zagat's survey. "Fast food?" Isn't this award kind of a dig at the same time, then? I mean, Starbucks used to pride themselves at being in a totally different category from fast food places, but I digress. (Full disclosure: this author is a former Starbucks barista.)

Starbucks has wasted no time in unleashing a new ad campaign touting their recent praise. It goes without saying that this is an honor McDonald's would have loved to win, and half expected to.

So this will be interesting. Starbucks' image is badly marred by the price premium associated with the brand. But the thing they've always tried to drive home is that, at the end of the day, they have the best coffee. Will this recognition help Starbucks turn their company around? Will it be the thing they needed to successfully tweak their brand strategy?

We'll see.

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.

One of the oldest and biggest companies here in Milwaukee is Briggs and Stratton. They are one of the largest manufacturers of small gasoline engines in the world. And, at 101 years old, they're the latest long-standing company to try to go viral.

Eddiegram.com allows you to send, surprisingly, an "Eddie Gram" to a someone. In your Eddie Gram, a creepy lawnmower with a human head will brag about the beauty of your lawn, or deride the lackluster status of your recipient's. This, hopes Briggs & Stratton, will turn your mind to lawnmowers, which, in turn, will help Briggs & Stratton sell motors.

If you think this is a stretch, wait until you see the site.

Remember kids, interactive media is no automatic guarantee of popularity... especially if the most engaging thing you can think of is a creepy humanoid lawnmower. This was someone's first idea.

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.

When it comes time for us to dream up a retail marketing strategy for your brand, our precise and painstaking brainstorming techniques have not been made well-known. And that's intentional. Sure, everyone knows we like to "think inside the circle." But what does that mean???

Well, the secret's out.

What would you do if your company filed for bankruptcy? How would you convince your customers they'd still be taken care of and that your brand was still relevant? This is GM's answer to that question. Watch the commercial if you haven't already seen it. What do you think?

Well, we've got some ideas. Stay tuned later this week for our thoughts, and for some case studies that demonstrate our proven ability to be turnaround specialists.

Email is great. Everyone has an email address (or four). It's instant. It's free or really cheap. You can't lose it like you could lose a piece of paper.

But email also kinda sucks. Its formatting potential is severely limited. You can attach almost any kind of file, but there's no guaranty that your recipient's email system can handle it because of size or file-type limitations. And if you accidentally delete a really important email, it's gone.

Well, the two brothers at Google who came up with Google Maps have come up with what they think could replace email. And we think they might be right.

If you've got an hour and a half to kill (hey — it's Friday), watch the demo of Google Wave here.

Otherwise, read a nice summary of the application here.

Google Wave lives on Google's servers. It's not software on your computer. You can use it anywhere, from any browser or mobile device that has internet access. So you can communicate, collaborate, and share files virtually anywhere, without being tied to a specific platform or "your" computer. It's like Email, Twitter, Instant Messaging, Facebook, and Flickr all in one solution. It's pretty brilliant, and it's coming later this year.