Your TV's URL address....

The Digital World Goes Out and About

Marketers need to figure out how brands can participate in conversations beyond the computer

Integration used to mean your microsite looked like your TV and print ads, and your TV spots were tagged with a URL.

The notion was solid at the time: TV really was the best starting point for most campaigns, and a Web site was the best place to send your potential customer for the next, or last, part of the marketing experience. The process was nice and clean and linear. The Web site was just an extension of the commercial. It was 60 seconds of extra consumer attention you couldn't afford to buy.

Integration is starting to mean something very different. It's not just about making sure there is a cohesive story across media, but about how one medium interacts with another. Does it make sense to serve up the same Web experience on a laptop and an iPhone? (Google doesn't think so.) Increasingly, we're looking at how to use digital experiences to create (and augment) physical experiences and interaction.

Last year, everyone focused on the augment part of that, and it meant one combination in particular: QR codes and Webcams. This year, we seem to be augmenting larger swaths of the world, a smearing of digital bits across everything. Some of the ideas use the sensors we have in our pockets (GPS, camera phone, etc.) to interact with the world around us. Things like Foursquare, Yelp, Google Goggles and Stickybits let you comment on the real world, which is the first wave of apps making things very different. In all these cases, the medium with which the mobile is interacting is a physical one: locations for Yelp and Foursquare, and "stuff" for Goggles and Stickybits.

What all these services are getting at is allowing the world around us to speak back. For Foursquare, that currently comes in the form of tips and deals. For Stickybits, it's content attached to a product (via the bar code). It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, "If these walls could talk."

And that's just it. Increasingly, these walls and cartons and soda cans will need to talk. But what will they say? And what else should be talking?

It's clear that mobile is going to be one side of the conversation. But the other end is limited only by the imagination. What if your commercial talked to your iPhone app? What about the store? (It could tell your mobile device where you are and what's available nearby.)

Even more powerful is when there's a computer on the other end for your mobile device to talk to that makes something new possible. Which is cool, because we've spent years programming computers all over the place, mostly Web sites, but also computers for events, malls and even places like Times Square. When there is a computer on both sides of a conversation, things get interesting and rich and fun because you're not just playing back the same thing over and over. It's interactive.

If that's where our medium is going, how do brands participate? To start with, it seems like we should be thinking about each and every touch point and how our experiences can bend and adapt. It also means that a piece of functional technology could be more effective than a tagline at tying together your marketing experiences. It might mean you've got to act like you're in the software business even if you make soda, because interacting with your customers, more often than not, will need a computer interface.

More than anything, though, it means brands have to get more interactive. This could mean getting more social -- not just having a Facebook page but looking at the tools available to make sure every touch point with your audience is actually interactive. Stop thinking of interactivity as a siloed category where you only converse with your customers online. Think more along the lines of how you can create interactive experiences around retail and on air and in print and on package and on premise and whatever else you can think of.

We've got to figure out how to take the best of the Web and bring it to wherever our audience is, so it feels like we are right there, like magic, when they want or need something from us. Which is what it's supposed to feel like in the future, right?

Brace Yourselves for the World Cup of Advertising...

Global marketers such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Nike are describing the 2010 FIFA World Cup as a larger event than even the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That scale -- combined with the intensity of interest in the sport, the national pride of fans and the fact that it's the first major global sporting event ever held on the African continent -- figures to sell a lot of sneakers and soft drinks.

ON THE BALL: Adidas is working with the overarching theme 'Every Team Needs,' and is heavily investing in new ball, footwear and apparel launches tied to the tournament.

"It's the No. 1 event in all of sports," Trevor Edwards, Nike's VP-brand and category management, recently told the company's investors, adding that the World Cup will be viewed by "half the world's population."

And it's why FIFA sponsors -- a group to which Nike doesn't belong, by the way -- spend up to $40 million for the privilege.

Coke, for instance, says its campaign for the World Cup will be the largest in the company's history, as well as its most integrated. The company's entire platform is built around the ebullient goal celebrations of soccer players, which Coke easily links to its long-held "Open Happiness" tagline.

The marketer's TV commercials, from Argentinean agency Santo, chronicle the history of goal-scoring celebrations. Coke has a 120-country, 17-language deal with YouTube to encourage viewers to film and post their own goal dances, and it even has persuaded FIFA to condone the awarding of a fan-voted trophy for the player with the best goal dance. There's also a celebration-themed anthem from Somali-born artist K'naan that is already charting on iTunes, and celebration-themed packaging and retail work, among other things.

Breaking through
"Consumers today are so connected and brands are talking to them in so many ways," said Emmanuel Seuge, Coke's group director of worldwide sports and entertainment marketing. "We need to be super-focused and super, super clear if we expect to break through the clutter."

Mr. Seuge said the roots of Coke's one-idea approach stemmed from a meeting between 13 agencies and Coke executives in South Africa in 2008, when executives presented the celebration concept and said they were only interested in approaches that utilized it.

That's a distinct shift for major sports sponsors, who traditionally assemble myriad programs around an event that sometimes have little apparent thematic connection to each other beyond the advertisers' logo.

Other marketers attempting to link their activities under a big, overarching idea this year include Visa and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Visa, a top-level FIFA partner, is conducting all of its activities under the same "Go Fans" platform it uses for the Olympics.

Its World Cup plans include a mobile app that lets fans monitor the match schedule, track scores and standings, chat with each other and even connect with the FIFA store. The "Visa Match Planner" app is part of a campaign that also includes TV, out of home, retail and social-media facets, all under the "Go" umbrella.

A-B, for its part, is operating off a platform called "Budweiser United," which emphasizes the brand's general ubiquity in sports while nodding to its new owners' even more global aspirations. One key component of A-B's effort, which also includes extensive advertising, is a digital reality show that will feature fans from all 32 participating countries living together in a "Big Brother"-style house.

Epic campaign
Nike is rolling out a new campaign called "Write the Future," which it describes as an evolution of its "Next Level" soccer campaign that focused on improving as an athlete and getting to an even higher level. Mr. Edwards said that the World Cup represents the ultimate level, and that all of Nike's work around the event will revolve around that idea.

The campaign includes an epic TV spot, from Wieden & Kennedy, that Mr. Edwards said is one of the best the company has ever produced, as well as a digital and mobile app called NikeFootball Plus, which features some of the best players in the world offering tips on tricks and training to get better. Nike isn't an official FIFA sponsor, but it sponsors several top teams and players, which gets it onto the field.

Some other major sponsors, such as Adidas and McDonald's, are taking a somewhat more piecemeal approach. Adidas has an overarching theme called "Every Team Needs" that it's emphasizing heavily in digital work featuring soccer stars describing different types of players, but it's also investing heavily in new ball, footwear and apparel launches tied to the tournament that are under separate platforms.

McDonald's, meanwhile, is operating a dizzying number of programs on the ground, including one sweepstakes that lets kids escort their favorite players onto the field, and another that gives South African women the chance to be part of an on-field dance routine. There's also a McCafé for the on-site press and a handful of digital programs meant to encourage fan interaction.

But, unlike Coke, McDonald's is deploying its activities at the games differently in each market.

Dean Barrett, McDonald's senior VP-global marketing, said the company's focus on utilizing the sponsorship in its stores trumps any desire to take a more homogeneous approach. "There are always some things that we can do globally, and digital is something that can be global," he said. "But the reality is that the World Cup is team-driven and local-market driven."

Leave it to Havianas to come up with a great grassroots strategy....

As marketers everywhere are gearing up their World Cup-related efforts, Brazil's Havaianas has come up with a simple approach –- these are the flip-flops you should be wearing to watch the soccer matches this summer in comfort and style.

The maker of trendy Havaianas is launching the Teams collection, with a pair of flip-flops for each of the 32 countries competing in the World Cup. Each pair looks like a brightly-colored team jersey in flip-flop form.

In Brazil the spot "Closet" broke this week, in which a well-known pair of actors, who are married in real life, try to decide which national team's flip-flops the husband, Daniel de Oliveira, should wear that day. Standing in a walk-in closet with dozens of pairs of Havaianas to choose from, Mr. de Oliveira ponders the merits of different countries -- Italy? Germany? Uruguay?-- based on how well they've done in previous World Cups. Wearing the Brazilian team's flip-flops would be too easy, almost cowardly, he reasons. Finally his impatient and hugely pregnant wife, Vanessa Giacomo, appears and grabs Serbia because that team's flip-flops are red and match the color of her husband's shirt.

The spot is by Almap BBDO, Sao Paulo, Havaianas' ad agency since 1993, and is in keeping with a strategy of using Havaianas-wearing celebrities in commercials in Brazil.

Even in less soccer-mad markets than Brazil, the Teams collection is part of Havaianas' strategy. In the U.S., where the company opened its own office almost three years ago as part of an international expansion that has seen sales outside Brazil grow from 1% a decade ago to about 14% of total sales last year, Havaianas will send about 400 mailers with Teams flip-flops to opinion formers. Cleverly playing on the idea that Brazil is often a soccer fan's second favorite team, after his own country, each mailer will contain a Brazil pair and a carefully-researched second pair. Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria Parker, for instance, will get Teams collection flip-flops from Mexico and Brazil, said Jim Anstey, marketing director of Alpargatas USA/Havaianas. Sao Paulo-based Alpargatas is the parent company, with about half of its sales coming from the Havaianas brand.

In the U.S., where the matches played in South Africa will air around lunchtime due to a six-hour time difference, Havaianas is also working with bars that will show World Cup games live starting June 11 to introduce a Havaianas theme. In New York, Brazilian bar Felix will put jerseys from the different World Cup national teams on the wall, next to the corresponding pair of Havaianas, Mr. Anstey said. And an Italian bar is painting a World Cup-themed mural on the wall that will include the Italian team's flip-flops.

Oh GM....back to your old, slick ways so soon?

A wave of criticism that started two weeks ago reached a crescendo this morning when Washington-based advocacy group Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging General Motors with deceptive advertising.

CEI claims the Detroit car maker misled the public when it said in a national TV ad it has paid back its Troubled Assets Relief Program bailout loan from the government. The spot, which was created by McCann Erickson, Detroit, ended its run last week. A McCann spokeswoman referred calls to the automaker.

The commercial featured GM Chairman-CEO Ed Whitacre walking through an assembly plant and saying that "we have repaid our government loan in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule."

Critics, however, argue that the ad is somewhat disingenuous, saying the repayment came from another government bailout account provided by TARP -- or as one TV pundit described it, "paying off your MasterCard with your Visa."

In the complaint filed with the FTC, CEI says the ad "gives the false impression that GM has used its own funds to pay back all the bailout money that it received from the federal government. In fact, GM has only repaid a fraction of those funds -- barely 10%. Moreover, GM apparently repaid its loan by using other federal funds."

"GM might argue that its ad is literally accurate, but the fact is it's completely misleading," said Hans Bader, senior attorney for CEI, which describes itself as a "public interest group dedicated to free enterprise and limited government."

A phone call seeking comment from GM was not returned at press time.

The ad has created something of a firestorm since it first aired two weeks ago. Republican members of Congress were among the first to jump on the scenario that the commercial was misleading. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said GM was engaged in "a TARP money shuffle."

In an April 29 letter to Mr. Whitacre, Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote that "your statements and the slick marketing campaign built around them constitute a lie to the American people, who have spent over $50 billion to bail out GM and currently own over 60% of the company. We are concerned that GM, under your leadership, has come dangerously close to committing fraud, and that you might have colluded with the United States Treasury to deceive the American public. ... GM's false advertisements are counterproductive and shameful, and they should stop."