What a Bright Idea!

For advertising agencies and their clients, reaching the hearts and minds of consumers is trickier than ever. Big ideas, local ad agency pros say, can no longer be conveyed in one-way messages. They involve meaningful dialogues with consumers: teaching them, engaging them, connecting with them emotionally so they become advocates of your brand.

We polled five area ad agencies for their bright marketing ideas.

Eric Mower and Associates
➜ Remington’s Faces of Success

Recognizing that a groundbreaking online experience can deliver brand sizzle and user loyalty beyond traditional advertising, the Sarasota office of $215-million national agency Eric Mower and Associates recently engaged Remington Products’ target audience of males, 18 to 34, with the campaign, “Face of Success.”

At the core of the campaign were a national sweepstakes and an interactive online grooming game designed to heighten customer engagement with the Remington brand of shaving products and move young men down the path to purchase. After entering the sweepstakes for a chance to win a trip to Las Vegas, young men could create an avatar by choosing from a combination of hair styles and facial hair looks. They got to test their look and best pickup lines on the game’s five female characters—real-life models who were transformed into computer-generated characters such as a fitness instructor, a blonde bombshell and the girl next door.

For example, if a clean-shaven face, short hair and choice of pickup lines didn’t work on the fitness instructor the first time around, the player could try again with a different look and opening line. (And the women didn’t respond randomly: Each female character was given a personality type, and the success of the pickup lines was determined using a Myers-Briggs analysis.) Each avatar could be sent to friends for their input, broadening the reach of the campaign.

“The game provided engaging and personal experience while approaching grooming in an entertaining way to draw them back to the site again and again,” says Heather McLain, account supervisor for PR at EMA’s Sarasota office.

The Sarasota team, led by Patricia Courtois, worked with other EMA offices to develop the Face of Success game. “Public relations included outreach to traditional media and bloggers, a Facebook page updating followers on the sweepstakes, and Twitter posts by the five female characters,” McLain explains.

McLain says the 13-week promotion garnered more attention than Remington’s previous sweepstakes had achieved in six months: 166,251 total entries and 12,747 unique entries. There were 40,000-plus game plays. “And amazingly,” McLain reports, “one person played the game 172 times.”

Cap Brand Marketing
➜ Ollo Olive Oil

Often, a great marketing campaign is a matter of taste. Case in point: Ollo, an Australian olive oil company with its sights set on the U.S. market, but with no distribution at all in this country. “Their marketing director was here in Southwest Florida, and the client wanted an agency nearby,” Sam Stern of Cap Brand Marketing explains.

“Ollo’s value proposition, from their point of view, was that they were the best-tasting premium olive oil in the $10 price range,” says Stern. “The client came in and asked us to taste Ollo vs. other brands in a process that was so similar to a wine tasting it inspired a campaign built on marketing Ollo through tastings.” That led to the notion of a sommelier (which Cap cleverly named an “Olivier”) as a spokesman for the brand.

The agency positioned Ollo as “so good you could drink it,” and the Olivier as an expert on olive oil taste, confirming the brand’s flavor as a powerful and memorable point of difference from competitors. Cap’s integrated campaign included publicity, print, Web design and interactive marketing.   

Cap invited food writers to five-course olive oil dinners with celebrity chefs in various markets. (The Beach Bistro on Anna Maria Island created an olive oil ice cream for dessert.) Major print and TV coverage as well as buzz in social media resulted from the events and demonstrations of olive oil tasting by the Olivier. The bottom line: distribution in 4,000 U.S. supermarkets in just one year.

Knight Marketing
➜ Cleveland Clinic

Advertising is always sharper when driven by a specific business issue, so there are no gimmicks in Knight Marketing’s campaign for the Cleveland Clinic in Broward County. “Just a good, solid, well-conceived marketing strategy,” says agency owner Tracy Knight.  

“Our new campaign had to build the client’s heart surgery volume while addressing the major challenge, which is that South Florida is a fiercely competitive healthcare market that includes Palm Beach and Dade counties. There are 60 hospitals in the region, including 21 in Broward County alone—just imagine,” Knight says.

Cleveland Clinic’s brand awareness was stronger in the Midwest than in South Florida, Knight says, noting that her company initially developed a campaign that increased its name recognition in local surveys in less than a year. Up next was a campaign that leveraged the brand while distinguishing Cleveland Clinic from its local competitors.

“They have an amazing heart program with a winning team of physicians, the latest technology and the research to back up those claims,” Knight says. The new campaign, which broke in February, involves strong messaging integrated across all media, including network and cable TV, radio, print, outdoor and Web, with some direct mail to follow.

TV spots and print ads are presented in three- or four-part statements, Knight says. The unique print presentation runs in a newspaper or magazine as a series of three ads on consecutive pages, culminating in a fourth ad that makes the claim, such as higher survival rates or lower risk of complications.  

“These are strong claims that make a critical difference in heart healthcare, and we support them with statistics on a special Web section we created with all the back-up data,” Knight says.