I really like the Snapple lady and the commercials featuring her:
Snapple seems convinced that walking away from who they are is going to stem the slide they have experienced through a mix of mismanagement, competition and walking away from who they are.
Snapple was a great brand, a brand that people loved. They loved the brand because of the virtues embodied by Wendy. The brand was approachable, authentic and humorous. Now it’s just a weird mish-mash of crap.
But hey, at least it’s a weird mish-mash of crap that will look good on a Brand Manager’s resume as they shuttle through brands, sticking around long enough only to change things and then move on.
Yes, I am cynical about Brand Managers.
Wendy Kauffman, the Snapple lady, said that she was offered a derisory contract, “I just couldn’t accept the contract because it was so one-sided and worth nothing.” The contract would have paid her for appearances without a promise that any would materialize, she said…and knowing Snapple, no promise that any would materialize means that none would materialize.
Why walk away from a heritage that people like? I just don’t get it.
I know that I shouldn’t do another post on Cadbury Schweppes because cheap publicity is what they after (and it doesn’t come cheaper than me), but yet again the marketing folks there have done something that I just can’t ignore. Even though I really want to.
According to a press release last week that referred to the UFO-like lights over Phoenix in late April, the lights were hostile aliens “here to eat us” and that “the best thing to do to appease these creatures” is give them 7UP. Worst case: “They’ll have something naturally delicious to wash us down with.”
First of all, this whole idea is not funny. It is the anti-funny. It kills funny with a blunt instrument and then cuts up its body and distributes it in wax paper to members of funny’s family.
Second, this marketing plan includes only a PR blast and a shipment of 7UP to “possible alien landing sites” in Phoenix and Orlando…making it completely irrelevant to, um, anyone in terms of being interesting or offering an incentive immediate purchase.
According to USA Today, Sean Gleason, head of the team that dreams up the tongue-in-cheek reactions, says it’s been a cost-effective way to get his brands noticed. “We don’t have the budgets that the big guys do. We have to make every single marketing dollar work even harder.”
I am not sure how a crazy stunt supported only by PR will maximize return on your investment, especially with your average 7UP consumer who is clearly not reading USA Today or the PR Newswire.
I do know, however, that it will get a blurb in USA Today. That is great insofar as it lets people like Sean Gleason show off to his affluent white male business friends who would never in a million years put down their Vitamin Water or Scotch for something as plebian as a 7UP but do respect the fact that yet again Mr Gleason was covered in the newspaper…it’s just not going to sell any more 7UP.
Neither is the Guns N’ Roses stunt. Or, for that matter, any other crazy stunt that results in some limited PR coverage and a blurb for Mr Gleason in USA Today.
These things don’t sell soda.
They also don’t build the brand. Nor do they get your brands noticed because your target isn’t reading USA Today or PR Newswire or the Business section of the local paper that has two sentences about advertising once a week. And ridiculous one-off stunts certainly don’t change preference or create an impulse for consumers to buy now. They have no effect on consumer behavior.
But, again, they do get Sean Gleason a mention in USA Today.
Snapple use to be a fun, innovative brand. It had great advertising with the Snapple woman, Howard Stern loved it and it seemed primed for bigger and better things…then it was sold and sold again and under the aegis of Cadbury Schweppes, it seems, to paraphrase one commenter, primed for sale to Coke or Pepsi.
Where to start? Maybe at the dated, still-not-redesigned packaging for the core product:
This is the best part of their product line-up because, though old, at least the design and logo are recognizable as Snapple. Especially the logo. There is a lot of equity in that logo…equity that the brand is stepping away from in their new Juice (that isn’t 100% juice) product:
Crappy vertical Snapple type, no more blue or red, no oval around the type. Completely forgettable. Oh, and still on shelf next to the base product…and next to the new Antioxidant Water product. Not only is this clearly a Glaceau knock-off, not only is it late to the game, not only does the label look like a cheap sales sample because of the heavy paper and crappy glue, but it has a different logo than the above products even though it sits on shelf next to them:
Let’s finish it off with the fourth product in the Snapple line-up. Also boasting a different logo treatment, the new Tea products actually taste good, but still have to sit on shelf next to the other Snapple products even though it looks nothing like any of the others. This is Branding 101. Snapple fails:
Maybe if Snapple had a bigger budget they could pull off creating all of the sub-brands as separately branding entities…but that’s a stretch. Not even Coca-Cola strays too far from the fonts and colors that make products identifiably Coke. They do that because it makes sense, because consumers want recognizable brands and products and because if they are going to spend a shit ton of money to build a brand they don’t plan to throw it away with a product design that doesn’t connect to the brand they have built.
These packages are atrocious not because they are bad designs, though it doesn’t really help Snapple’s case that they are, but because consumers driven to buy (or driven to passive preference) via advertising end up on shelf not knowing what the hell is going on.
To top it all off a little Plano-based birdie tells me that Cadbury Schweppes’ in-house production and pre-press shop Group 360, which brands itself as a digital asset management and workflow solutions shop and whose in-every-way-horrible website tells you all you need to know about the agency’s design capabilities, is going to be handling the base Snapple packaging redesign.
Not a bad gig for a bunch of low-rent studio artists and totally fitting for what the brand has become.
Yet again, the Daily (Ad) Biz was right. I have been posting for a while – just search Dr Pepper or Cadbury Schweppes if you would like the history – about the imminent loss of the Dr Pepper account byY&R San Francisco.
If I had been in town and posting I would have reported it earlier, but in this case AdWeek beat me to it.
Dr Pepper, which at first pretended that the pitch was only for the “drink slowly to enjoy the more flavors of Dr Pepper” before admitting that it was actually for the whole brand ($35 million in ad spending last year), has chosen Deutsch/LA.
“We looked at a number of agencies, and each of them brought its own unique vision to the project,” said Sean Gleason, client svp, in a statement. “However, the Deutsch/LA team brought an approach that quickly grew into more than a project. Much more. We feel we have an exciting new campaign for Dr Pepper.”
What Mr Gleason is not saying, however, is that he has a dear old friend at Deutsch/LA…just like he has a buddy at Initiative…and he even has a good mate at Source Marketing, a promotions agency that he just brought into the fold. I am not saying that the pitch was unfair, just that a Plano-based e-mailer finds the whole thing curious and so do I.
Note to interactive agency VML, aka “The Last Agency Standing”: if you or one of your agency’s muckety-mucks is not very good friends from back in the day with that Gleason character then I would be nervous. Very nervous.
The worst part of all of this is that Dr Pepper as a brand is actually doing well compared to the competition and category. According to the Wall Street Journal from March 13, Dr Pepper’s volume is down but by less than half as much as Coke and Pepsi. It’s market share has even improved!
If you look at Cadbury Schweppes as a whole, their volume is down as well, but again it is down less than half as much as Coke and Pepsi and it is the only major beverages company (here we are ignoring small companies like Red Bull, Rockstar, etc) to have gained market share.
But hey, why not replace the Media Agency of the Year and why not fire your ad agency since the 1960s and hire an agency with no category experience?
I mean, the brand really needs a shake-up…especially if that shake-up allows a certain SVP to hire his buddies’ agencies.
According AdAge… marketers apparently can’t get enough of reorganization, but they aren’t getting much satisfaction from it either.
No surprise there as the people controlling the re-org are usually the ones responsible for much of the initial mess.
Reorganization – of the internal teams and the external agencies – has reached a crescendo at Cadbury Schweppes. The internal teams have already been wracked by one big round of layoffs, ostensibly to make the beverages side of the company more attractive to potential buyers, and has another one lined up if the rumors are to be believed. Then there are all of the people who have left the company of their own accord – almost the entire Brand and Activation team on Snapple and Mott’s – and others, including Director of Interactive Erika Knight.
That move doesn’t bode well for interactive agency VML.
Nor does the fact that VML’s WPP cousins Mediaedge:cia and Y&R have been fired and are in a review that Cadbury Schweppes is pretending isn’t a review respectively. The word is that they might just fire all of their agencies and start fresh with a completely new roster across all brands and functions. That would be fun.
Maybe Cadbury Schweppes could just pull a Dell and just start their own agency completely staffed with cronies and old friends of the VP of Marketing and the CMO (or whoever is calling the shots over there).
While this sort of behavior is par for the course with many marketers (I know that everyone reading this has at least one horror story and maybe more) it is still fucked up. Especially so is the word that Y&R, which isn’t exactly a Daily Biz favorite, was not told that other agencies were pitching against it and officially heard the news through Adweek.
Wow, that was quick. This blog thing is fantastic – it keeps agencies and, most importantly, clients honest about what they are doing in the otherwise shady world of advertising by way of concerned commenters and e-mail tipsters. Just a few hours after posting about Cliff Freeman trolling for new brand business, the word on what Cliff Freeman is on about is officially published:
Senor Freeman and agency are on the hunt for Dr Pepper (and probably Sunkist, 7UP and maybe even A&W) as additions to the agency roster.
The initial challenge is Dr Pepper, with Cliff Freeman in a four-way scramble for the business against incumbent Y&R, Droga5 and – how do they belong – Deutsch LA. That is going to be a doozy…and not only because Y&R is unlikely to retain the business considering that WPP cousin Mediaedge was just shown the door and WPP-owned interactive agency VML is on thin ice…oh, and that Y&R’s work was only so-so. Good times at Cadbury Schweppes. Better times at Y&R.
I guess that is what a re-org (and a bunch of client-side douchebags) will do to agency relationships.
The unverified word is that Dr Pepper has a new insight that it has briefed the agencies on, and the agency that comes up with the best way to activate it “holistically” will win the business. No telling so far what that super-awesome and totally compelling insight is but, considering that Dr Pepper is a mere soda brand, this blog’s bet is that the insight is not quite as powerful as the Brand Manager bucking for promotion might think that it is.
Not that it matters – the Brand Manager will be moved to a new brand in two months anyway, so what do they care? They have made their short-term mark and notched a reason for promotion into their belt. Woohoo!
I am not going to pretend that I don’t like saying “I told you so” because, frankly, I do. I told you so.
Agency Spy, who was also in the mix early, also enjoys saying and and goes on to note that Initiative is certain to be partying hearty after this win and that of the Hyundai/Kia account. Congratulations, the celebration is well deserved.
Kansas City-based interactive agency VML has come in for a lot of fire here on The Daily (Ad) Biz despite Y&R holding official Least Favored Agency status.
It all started so well, with kudos to the agency for the nicely designed Snapple website. But then the readers weighed in and VML got raked over the coals for taking a three quarters of a million dollar bath on site production.
And then more comments came in calling out VML staffers by name and slamming the account and creative team that works on the Cadbury Schweppes business.
Again, the word is that the boys (and girls) at VML bear much, if not all, of the responsibility for yet another big error:
I am an employee of the carbonated side of Cadbury Schweppes, although I don’t work directly with VML, I can say that this is another VML screw up. I work in very close proximity to the A&W (and other carbonated drink) managers in Plano, TX. Needless to say, they are pretty fed up with VML’s attitude, processes and account management.
Due to VML’s “holier than thou” attitude towards Cadbury’s agency partners, nobody wants to deal with them. – so it’s bad communication all the way around and a press release goes out without VML’s input and you get what you have here. A half-assed lunder construction page thrown up to cover VML’s slow asses.
Let’s just hope that that VML comes through on the website, but rumblings within the office down here in good ‘ol Texas is that the website doesn’t hit the mark. Of all the concepts presented, this was the only “usable” one that came close. Due to budgets, VML wouldn’t budge on any redo and they had to make this one work. People aren’t to happy about it either.
2008 will be interesting for the Cadbury and VML relationship.
Coupled with an email from a loyal tipster that alleges that the first round concepts from VML were so bad that the internal interactive team did not even show them to anyone else and just told VML to actually read the brief and have another go, 2008 is going to be very interesting indeed.
I remember getting root beer floats at my Grandma’s house in the summers of my youth so I am inclined to nostalgia about the concept, though the product might be too rich for me now. Andrew Springate, VP of Marketing, calls them “indulgent treats like nothing consumers have experienced before; one pour and your taste buds will be amazed – no work, no hassle.” Definitely too rich. But a good product idea.
The cousins that I had so much fun with over the holidays would, in particular, love something like this.
And then they would bounce off the walls for a week.
There is more to launching a product than actually getting it into market, and that is getting all of the marketing support up and running. Especially a website. In fact, it could be argued that a website is the cost of doing business these days.
I will caveat that just in case it gets up and running later on (as one hopes that it does since it is in every PR clip picked up by Google). The website has not worked all morning. I began trying to view it at 8am EST and it is not past 10…and I just tried a minute ago and still no luck.
Hopefully this is not something that Cadbury interactive agency VML is to blame for. They have been taking serious heat for the debacle that was the Snapple website and, especially after reading some of the comments to that linked story, it is clear that VML cannot afford another fiasco.
Yours truly will keep digging and you can keep laughing at this case of marketing ineptitude.
Agency Spy, that central hub of industry gossip dogged by a very un-user friendly new site, has taken the traditional end of the year list gimmick and given it a new twist by inviting “a bunch of big deal advertising shop owners, ECDs and a-plus bloggers to answer a series of questions” and then posting their answers without attribution…just in case things got a little, um, off the record.
I am not a-plus enough to have gotten the questions sent my way, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be answering them.
Please feel free to email me (dailybizblog, yahoo, you know the drill) or leave a comment if you too have the inclination to make your own end of year list. And who doesn’t really? These things are always interesting, at least in passing.
1. What was the worst campaign of the year?
Without a doubt, it is the new Subway campaign featuring Peter Griffin from Family Guy. Not only is this campaign the only possible way to make Peter Griffin unfunny, but it takes a brand that is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that whole wellness trend thing and goes off into irrelevance:
2. What was your favorite campaign of the year?
This is sadly unoriginal, but Mac vs PC is the best campaign of the year. From the casting to writing to the art direction, everything about it is perfectly tuned to build the Apple brand while pulling a strangely pleasant hit job on PCs. Usually comparison ads like this do not result in a brand halo and goodwill for the attacker, but when they are done this well they are.
3. Which client is the worst to work on (can be one yours, was one of yours or someone else’s)?
4. Which CMO deserves being whacked for his work this year?
It has got to be the CMO of Ford. Finally, the marque is building cars of (and above) Japanese-quality, their designs are contemporary and appealing and I have actually overheard people who are surprised to learn that the car they saw was a Ford and yet a huge swathe of consumers, especially younger consumers, has no interest in purchasing a Ford simply because it is a Ford. That is a branding issue. While it is an issue for all of the Big Three, this year Ford actually had the products to change perceptions, but kept rolling out the usual dreck. That has gotta change.
5. Which ECD has the biggest ego of the year?
Though I considered David Lubars because I am convinced that he keeps Googling his name, he at least has the work to back up his ego where as Bozo the Clown, lead CD at the House of Biz does not. Yet he still thinks that he is David Droga or something. Gotta have the work first, douche.
6. Which brand should fire their ad agency pronto and why?
BMW. I know that the new CMO wanted his own guys and all that, but the dichotomy between the quality of the work from Fallon and the mediocrity from new agency GSD&M is embarrassing. It’s time to bring in someone who can get it done.
7. Which advertising agency should consider firing its top level management?
Y&R. That agency is just a random assortment of accounts housed under one roof. There is nothing that sets them apart, nothing that makes something “Y&R work” and no real reason for them to be around.
8. Which agency is likely to suffer (losses, employees jumping ship, revenue slides) the most next year?
9. What shop has done the best work in 2007 (other than your own of course)?
If “best work” means best new breakthrough idea and not most advertising that matches the style and tone that I like, then clearly the winner is Droga5. Sure, I panned their Honeyshed idea, but nobody had yet thought to bring QVC online just like nobody thought about selling books online before Amazon. The idea is simple, but if it works it is a completely out-of-the-box idea for an ad agency, and if it works like Amazon’s did then some people are gonna get rich.
Honorable mention goes to Anomaly for their new look at agency compensation. Gotta get paid.
10. Which broadcast spot made you want to hurl?
Burger King’s “Sponge Bob No Pants” spot. Let me get this straight…to sell food, you are going to show a shirtless man wearing a sponge on his head talking about how he has no pants on?
11. What was your favorite spot (that your shop did not create)?
Dr Pepper’s “Cherry Chocolate Rain” viral video. It’s a viral video that actually went viral using a guy, Tay Zonday, who is really funny and Y&R must be red in the face because their client is more creative than they are. Win, win, win.
