Enjoy!

I have learned that not only my favorite characters from Sesame Street have improved their style (the equipment of Super-Grobi – his German name – is amazing) and some of them were new to me, but also requirements of research improved. James pointed out that 2005 there were 6 channels where you could get in contact with Sesame content, 2011 they have 21 channels.

No wonder that they need to know a lot of different things about their audience: unique audience, total audience, device interaction and sources of engagement, just to name a few. TV is still key, but gaming devices, audio, web, mobile, podcasts and other devices are emerging and covering a relevant art of channel preferences in the pre-school target group.

After a huge secondary analysis they decided to conduct a huge quantitative study with 2.000 children aged under 8 years. That gave them the opportunity to drill down contact clusters on iTunes, podcasts, amazon etc. as well as important results for future purchase of newer devices in order to spotlight trends. 

Together with existing data from Nielsen, comScore and so on they were able to build a model and bridging the custom data with these common sources.

It was quite interesting that they found a way to develop a multiplatform model to say that over 50 million are in contact to Sesame content. This is an important number for their revenue model (what I didn’t realize is that Sesame workshop is a non-profit organization) in order to give value to their reach. 

And of course – like in every huge surveys – there are a number of other interesting results. Just to name two of them. TV is still number one and key to deliver a first experience of Sesame content. But Online and Mobile is important to engage and enhance frequency of usage.

And I found myself belonging to the “Digital Dads” which bring a new gatekeeper segment to the responsible people at Sesame workshop. They usually stick to the “sesame moms” (described as mothers, who interact with their children and Sesame content on TV and web). But “Digital Dads” bring Sesame content with Apps on iPads, Smartphones and Podcast to their kids. 

Interesting.

Something not completely different but important in a broader sense was presented by Dr. Timothy de Waal Malefy from BBDOs Cultural Discoveries. It was all about rituals and how brands could benefit from this. He pointed out that rituals are nothing new for humans, but for most of the brands. 

The basis for exploring rituals is to look at people. Because consumers use brands to suit their needs and to share their experiences with others. So there is a huge opportunity to learn from the customers in order to identify rituals and make them work for brands. A brand’s benefits can be (among others) to give guidance for a meaningful live to customers. 

But it is not easy to find the ritual, because there are a lot of requirements that needs to me fulfilled before you can call it a ritual. Generally speaking a ritual is a fixed sequence of behaviors that transform us from one state to another, emotionally or physically or both.

It is a powerful motivating experience and develops strong loyalties (best practice: the ritual of weddings). Rituals operate in a clear framework and are highly sensorial, memorable and pleasurable. 

Timothy compared rituals with habits, while habits are single and functional tasks, do not transform a brand benefit and require low or no conscious effort. 

The distinction between the two concepts is clear, but it stayed theoretical to me unless he said that the ritual is “the journey” and the habit is “the destination”. This again is true for wedding, although some people regard a wedding as a habit or other like this ritual so much that they want to have it again and again

But basically it makes a lot of sense to look at rituals in this way. Timothy showed a lot of research and advertising for “The art of shaving” and he mentioned the ritual of making your own coffee. 

First of all I was thinking about rituals as some sort of elitist’s doing in order to differentiate from others, because rituals show knowledge and express mastery. But and the end and by answering questions from the auditorium Timothy pointed out that even this is mostly the case and rituals is not for every brand, there are some examples for rituals in mass market. Barbie vs. American Girl Doll, Build a bear or even the ritual of Hispanics in the US starting to drink wine are good examples for this.

Next session was about women, apparel and the NFL. Alicia Z. Ranking presented backgrounds, process and results for a re-positioning of NFL Womens’ apparel (and the success of it). 

Although I am more into soccer I could understandmost of the things that were said. It is important to make good offers for women, because 445 of NFL fans are female and they are nearly 8 hours a week engaged with NFL. Even more important is the fact that they spend $ 315 million on NFL apparel.

I like Alicia’s descriptions of the former approach to make a good offer to women. It is called “shrinking & pinking” and says that they took the men’s apparel, shrinked it and made it pink.

The basis for improving this was a huge online research with some face-to-face components. And they build a segmentation on this survey, which revealed a lot of shopper insights such as affinity to NFL apparel and purchase behavior as well as attitudes and insights for product development.

One of the key findings, which they used for developing the campaign, is that women pay more attention towards fashion related items of NFL apparel and men basically want to show their team affinity. And they also found out, that the female core target consists of active and family-oriented women, aged 20-39 years.

So they decided to create awareness for NFL women’s apparel by leveraging a health and fitness performance that fits with the target’s fashion style and lifestyle. In addition they wanted to feature women as NFL fans, which they achieved by featuring real NFL women (I forgot their names. If this were soccer ladies I would probably remember ). But look at this:

They did a lot more to support this campaign (events, microsite, contests, cause-related etc.). And the business increased by 40% and 75% were aware of redesigned product line. Even the campaign was a huge success, 70% recall overall and 63% recall brand related. 

To my point of view this is a good example for having success when you have your business objectives clear and stick to a limited number of relevant results but keeping these at the spearhead of your marketing activities.

After this I attended the Social Media & Communities track to hear Nick Mysore talking about “Trend Spotting with Social Media to Grow Your Business”.

He introduced his speech by focusing on using social media for strategy (and therefore for business) and so (I thought) he would go one step further than saying that listening to consumer on Facebook etc. is important. 

He had a lot of numbers (very good and convincing ones) to support the fact that social media is here to stay, and that is becoming more and more important for marketing. I really liked the style of presentation, very entertaining and very convincing. But for my personal scope there wasn’t much to learn than good examples to show people that social media is important. 

Anyway, it is important to listen and it is important to learn how to listen from these how do it well (like US Gov. for instance). And it is also important to connect the listening with the strategy. Therefore Nick recommends focusing on themes. As an opposite of “a shotgun approach” he mentioned that of course a selection of themes is of course a risk (to choose the wrong ones). But otherwise complexity is too big and it is impossible to deep dive into themes and to deliver results. To create such patterns depends on the strategy and you must be brave enough (or your internal or external clients) to take the risks of social media. Social media is less reliable. But it is more penetrating and honest response. 

This leads to the daily practice that social media is not replacing anything. But it is simple to track and must be simple to implement into marketing (controlling).

The last track I attended was about Celebrity and Engagement in a DVR world by TiVo. Most of the time I saw impressive spots. And I learned that the spending in TV ads are worthwhile, despite the fact that 54% of all primetime TV is time-shifted. 

This relates to former results 5-10 years ago, where it was revealed that is important to keep the engagement high within the audience in order to keep their attention for TV advertising. This is the same now, even if the forward advertising. Let’s take Mad Men as an example.

This Suave ad was shown and people who forwarded advertising thought the film would continue. 

Or let’s have a look at snickers and Superbowl:

People are repeating this spot, because it supports the feeling of the sports. 

The same for X-factor and Pepsi:

All in all it was a very exiting day.  Looking forward to tomorrow and more hot market research stuff.