The Beer Institute reported in 2008 that Americans drink more beer on the 4th of July than any other day of the year. Seems like a good time to kick off a series of blog posts about digital marketing and beer! My colleagues and I know a thing or two about the sauce. Not because we like to tie one on (although we’ve done that maybe just once or twice) but because we spent several years as the primary digital agency (DNA Studio) over at the King of Beers, Anheuser-Busch. So I’m going to devote a couple of summer posts to beer marketing and digital marketing’s role in it.

According to the Beer Institute, beer is the #1 most popular alcoholic beverage in America and accounts for roughly 85% of the total alcoholic beverages sold each year. That seems like great news if you are in the business of selling beer. But the trouble is not the volume, it’s the trend. Industry shipments were down 4% last year, including the craft sector. In a recent article from AdAge, Harry Schuhmacher, the publisher of Beer Business Daily said this about beer sales at food, convenience and drug stores:

“I’ve never seen so much red ink on a spreadsheet in all my years in this business. It’s really disconcerting.”

Ouch. In fact, craft breweries and cheaper brands are the only areas that are seeing any sort of growth. This is putting remarkable pressure on Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors whose top brands Bud Light, Coors Light and Miller Light, have typically led their sales.

The beer companies are quick to blame the economy. But call me crazy (and I’m not basing this in any kind of data here) but when you are out of a job, aren’t you maybe a little MORE apt to grab a 6-pack at the convenience store to while away the hours? Regardless of that particular insight, I think there’s something else going on here.

These large brands as mass brands. They were designed to appeal to a wide audience. But “mass audiences” are a thing of the past. I can remember learning about using aspirational tactics to drive marketing appeal when I was in college. Nowadays, the trick is realizing that many people aspire to be a little bit unique. Or at least to have an “in” that makes them more interesting to or differentiated from their peers or a taste that is a little more defined and specific. I think that’s partly why the remaining beer drinkers are bringing those craft brews to the party rather than being the guy who shows up with a 12-pack of Bud Light.

That’s probably why the new products divisions of A-B and MillerCoors are working overtime, developing brand extensions and craft-like brands and flavors. But are they not using the same mass techniques to market the stuff? Take Bud Light Lime and Bud Light Golden Wheat. Sort of different but sort of the same too, right?

We spent a lot of time helping A-B bring new products to the market in the mid-2000′s. And although every single product didn’t explode, we helped with some of the most successful new product launches at the time including Bacardi Silver and Michelob Ultra. Sort of ironically, one of our tactics was something we called webmaster relations. We’d reach out to webmasters running sites that pertained to the niche audience of would-be believers in a given product or service and get them interested in checking out the product and our site. Sounds a lot like social influence marketing, doesn’t it? Then we ran rich media ads to appeal to those same niche audiences once the brand started to pick up some steam. And what happened? Traffic flowed in.

So what do you do if you are working in the new products division at one of the big breweries? Let people feel like they discovered the brand (don’t slap the name Bud Light on it) and put a serious social ecosystem behind it to start generating buzz. Give the brand an edge, some quirkiness, some history or a sense of mystery. Give the product the attributes that research shows it needs and then target it at a niche that has enough mass to drive your business. And then just keep working at it. Everything that advises how social influence marketing works best says to stay away from corporate speak. Stay away from mass appeal. Have a conversation. Plenty of people are have conversations about beer. Why aren’t the big beer companies participating? We’ll look at some cool examples from some of the smaller guys in future posts.

In 1982 I was living in Toronto, Canada and my dad and I watched just about every match of that World Cup together. Italy’s goal-scoring hero, Paolo Rossi, became my idol for a year or so before my allegiance moved to Manchester United’s Frank Stapleton. Regardless, I remember sitting in front of a tiny tv watching a poor picture transmitted from Spain. It was enjoyable an enjoyable and engrossing tournament and one that changed my life forever. I was more obsessed with the game than anything else. I also loved the Italian team (think “Breaking Away”) and my dad looked everywhere for a photo of the team for me. Eventually, he found one at an Italian restaurant in Toronto’s Little Italy – this was months after the tournament and the picture appeared on a box of biscotti. Needless to say, it was tough to find information, photos and no chance finding videos of the players or matches.

In 2010 everything in different. There is so much chatter and information online that if you don’t want to know the result of a match you literally need to cease all communication to the outside World – no cell phones, no landlines, no twitter, no facebook, nothing online. However, if you do want to stay connected and you can’t get to a TV it’s never been easier and more thorough.

Twitter issued a statement saying they would be expecting outages in their service as people were tweeting non-stop during the matches. During the USA v England match more than 1 billion tweets were sent in 90 minutes. You can join Twitter’s World Cup conversation (and make a little soccer ball appear in your tweet) by using “#worldcup” in your post. If you use the right three letter hashtag, such as #usa or #rsa you can make a flag show up. So, when you’re quickly browsing tweets you see tons of little flags and instantly see just how many people are talking about this tournament.

There are about 20 ways to watch the matches online (the link was supplied by one of our Italian Twitter followers) and apparently only one of them is legal – ESPN3.com. However, you have to have Verizon as your ISP, so we make due and use sites like iraqgoals.net, justin.tv and others. If you do have ESPN3 access you can watch matches on your phone. This sort of thing still astounds me. Even if you can’t watch the actual matches you can listen on ESPN radio, follow along with the live stats and watch video replays of goals moments after they’ve happened.

Google has a World Cup calendar which syncs with regular Google Calendar and let’s people know you’re in a meeting when a match is on although we surely wouldn’t condone that sort behavior. Speaking of calendars, there are literally thousands of calendars and brackets out there, but none as beautiful as the one put out by Spain’s La Marca.

For those of you who actually want to venture out of the house just about every establishment with televisions will be showing these matches. The NYTimes.com, who constantly kills it when it comes to interactive features, has various ways of visualizing stats from the matches and for those in the five boroughs and interactive map showing where to go to watch your team.

Finally, there are so many videos online of the goals that the real challenge is trying to watch them before they’re removed because of copyright issues. With that said, here’s a video of the first goal of the tournament and arguably the best so far by Siphiwe Tshabalala of South Africa.

Also highly recommended are The Guardian UK’s Daily World Cup Podcast and US Soccer Fan Doug Zimmerman’s Photoblog from South Africa. However, not highly recommended is the irritating vuvuzella iphone app which seems (if walking around my neighborhood is any indication) to be getting downloaded way too often. Enjoy The Cup!

It’s easy when you work in this business every day to take for granted the speed of innovation. When each day’s RSS feed bring something new, you can lose sight of the bigger picture. This is a dangerous position because as technology accelerates us ever faster toward “the future”, brands run the distinct risk of being left behind.

Forrester’s report described the era of social colonization which turned out to be a brief blip on the Internet’s timeline. In this stage, Facebook Connect allowed people to traverse the web, taking their Facebook friends with them. The boundaries between social networks and websites started to receed and the response was huge. Websites loved how Facebook Connect so simply made relevancy and sharability possible on their sites. Users loved the novelty of hanging around with their friends on little social colonies outside of Facebook.

Next comes the era of social context. This is the era we are in now, with all of it’s privacy pain and misfortune. The concept is that sites will recognize people’s personal identity and social graph and personalize their experience based on it. So when you arrive at Pandora.com, the site is personalized with your Facebook friends playlists and favorites, allowing you to browse their selections and work them into your own.  Mark Zukerberg has really taken a beating for being the company that ushered in this era. But you can’t blame the kid. He has build a company with an extreme and successful approach to innovation. I think his problem is that he built a site based on the concept that you have a safe place to go and share things with people you know. But now, in the Twitter and Flickr era, open sharing has become a more important trend and Mark & Co are determined not to miss the boat. For the average Joe, this trend shift is not even a part of their consciousness so for the largest and most popular social network to thrust it upon them is going to be painful. But, I have no doubt that users will come around to the idea of a social context web and in many ways, they already have. But can Mark take us to the next level of Forrester’s prediction?

The next era is that of social commerce. Forrester predicts that by 2013 (and perhaps before), communities will become much more powerful. Versatile, open IDs will merge social sites and the larger web into a common experience. Users will have complete control over their identities and will choose what of their personal data they want to expose to brands. Brands that have gained users trust will be able to offer more personalized experiences on a larger scale and sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will become the intermediaries between consumers and brands in the information-sharing dance. Since consumers will at that point be harnessing their collective buying power through communities, this intermediary role becomes critical and powerful as does the brand’s ability to solicit that user’s data. Trust in a brand’s ability to do cool (not creepy) stuff with your personal information will elicit community purchases and become a true competitive advantage.

Facebook is clearly on the forefront of this movement today. My question is for how long? There are so many utilities out there for sharing, rating/liking, reviewing, acknowledging, etc. Will something like OpenID bring the robust unification of utilities that will make life easier on consumers and data more robust for marketers? Or do these folks at the OExchange have the solution, with their quest for standardizing the link and information sharing process across the web? Or will Facebook themselves deliver an interoperable standard for these items? And as more and more of these utilities move to open source solutions, how will your own brand be positioned to take advantage of a future that looks very different than today and yet is only a couple of years away.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

In his new book, Glimmer, Warner Berger brings forth the idea that the process of design (as practiced by the greats) can and should be applied well beyond the confines of its perceived role as the basis of “fashionable clothing or handbags, distinctive typefaces, elegant Philippe Starck furniture or Michael Graves teakettles”. Berger makes cases for design as a transformative influence on business, the social sector, and even life. One of his primary muses in the book, Bruce Mau, seems to have designed writing a book right out of his life, hence why Berger is the author here and not Mau! But that doesn’t matter, the book will give you plenty to think about, especially if you, yourself, are not a designer.

This is not a book about product design or website design. It is about, as Bruce Mau puts it “the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.” Berger shows how design has helped solve such interesting challenges as how to make certain that senior citizens take the right dosages of their medicine, how to bring portable computing to the developing world, how to create an effective stop-smoking campaign for teenagers, and how to inspire a company to rally behind their products by redesigning the product as a passion.

Berger brings forth 10 Glimmer Principles that serve as the blueprint for transformative design and are the primary chapters of the book. Some are actionable. Others are conceptual. Here they are:

Ask Stupid Questions: What is design?

Jump Fences: How do designers connect, reinvent, and recombine?

Make Hope Visible: The importance of picturing possibilities and drawing conclusions

Go Deep: How do we figure out what people need – before they know they need it?

Work the Metaphor: Realizing what a brand or business is really about – then bringing it to life through designed experiences

Design What You Do: Can be way a company behaves be designed?

Face Consequences: Coming to terms with the responsibility to design well and recognizing what will happen if we don’t

Embrace Constraints: Design that does “more with less” is needed more than ever in today’s world

Design for Emergence: Apply the principles of transformation design to everyday life

Begin Anywhere: Why the small actions are more important than the big ones

As someone who has to create (dare I say design) presentations, concepts and programs in my job, I enjoyed the read and the book gave me plenty to think about (several inspired blog posts have already been drafted). Although the subtitle of “how design can transform your life, and maybe even the world” feels pretty lofty, the concepts that Berger presents definitely have the potential to make a big impact on the way you think about your job and the world around you. If you are already a designer, I don’t think this book will offer much except maybe for some inspirational examples. And I will caution that Berger’s reuse of many of the same examples throughout the book can make finishing it a bit tiresome. All that said, if you could use a little creative inspiration in your approach to a challenge, a peek at the way a designer thinks cannot be a bad thing. Check out Glimmer.

Here’s a stunning 30-photo collage from Boston.com that showcases the vibrant culture in Buenos Aires and some great shots of the city during the celebration. I wish I was there!  http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/argentinas_bicentennial.html

You better believe the advertising industry is getting into the celebration as well! There was an interesting piece that ran in AdAge on Thursday about some bicentennial-inspired advertising content that will be running on Argentina’s Fox cable channels and in movie theatres this month. Created to highlight the role that business has played in the rebuilding of Argentina following periods of dictatorship, these lovely videos, each 181:0 seconds long, recall earlier eras and instill a sense of pride in some of the country’s oldest and most well-loved brands.

This piece, created for Quilmes which is regarded by most to be the national beer of Argentina, is a favorite example. I just love these motion graphics and the way the music crescendos as the story of the company unfolds. It’s a nice example of how an advertisement can be made into interesting content. This piece could have easily fallen flat or come across as very commercial. Rather, it’s the perfect blend of brand and the story of a nation.

Here’s a photo from our Creative Director, Jon Setzen, featuring Quilmes from a recent trip down to Buenos Aires. Ahhhh … refreshing.

You can check out the rest of that photo set at our Flickr account. Feliz Bicentenario Argentina!

Monday Funday returns this week highlighting the work of the smart folks over at Method who are good at finding lots of fun and effective ways of hocking their soap. Sometimes controversial, always buzz-worthy, Method makes a big splash with a relatively small budget over and over again.

Take this spot, Shiny Suds, that Method aired in October. The point of the video is that you don’t really know what’s in your cleaner and that congress should mandate full disclosure of all of the chemicals that a typically marketed cleaner contains. The ad closes by touting peopleagainstdirty.com, a microsite that details the initiatives currently in the House and Senate addressing the need for greater transparency on home cleaners. AdAge reported that crowd at the Association for National Advertisers, where the ad was debuted, seemed to love the ad. A group of feminists was less impressed. Method pulled the ad but of course in our virally-charged marketplace, the creative piece lives on. I for one am not offended and I think the point is most excellently delivered. Buckets of fun right here:

Next the Method folks decided to have a little fun with their big-budget competition in Clorox. Recently, Clorox filed a cease and desist letter with Method over use of the yellow daisy image which Method has incorporated into its packaging and advertising for the last 6 years, long before the Clorox GreenWorks line was introduced.  In response to the letter, Method has launched a microsite votedaisy.com where visitors are encouraged to decide who should own the daisy, Method, Clorox or Mother Nature.

Both of these initiatives drive to peopleagainstdirty.com where visitors are encouraged to contact their local representatives and urge the bills to pass. Method also touts their “cleaner clean” positioning and talks about the need for transparency.  Method qualifies for Monday Funday status because they so skillfully use levity to call attention to serious matters and of course sell their soap.  Method has just introduced their Laundry line and we can’t wait to see what viral initiative gets launched next.

Method, if you are listening, Something Massive is picking up what you are putting down. Way to get your point across and make us chuckle a little bit too. We salute you!

One of our very favorite marketers, Scion, announced their latest marketing innovation this morning. “Reinvent the Wheels” is a 6-part web-only reality series that chronicles the journeys of 6 creatives as they build a car that will further their creative craft and push the boundaries of self-expression. Scion has lined up tattoo artist ZULU to serve as a mentor and three tuners from famed garages to help bring the vehicles to life. True to the reality format, surprise challenges will give the contestants the opportunity to win additional time to put toward customizing their car.

You can watch the trailer here. For Scion, this is a perfect expression of their brand which has always sought to highlight and support indie creative, and of course to underscore the ultra-customization that Scion enables and encourages. And watching the series won’t feel at all like watching an ad. That’s fun.

Of course, content like this that is produced by brands is not entirely new. Although some brands adopted the format several years ago, we believe that only now are the stars aligning to make these kinds of initiatives a viable and effective means of marketing. The web has become a destination for entertainment – even beyond the 30 second funny video on YouTube – with the popularity of sites like Hulu. Plus, even despite the crazy proliferation of cable channels, the web remains the very best place to find niche content opportunities that speak directly to an individual’s taste and interests. Now brands can bring the kind of niche content that a movie studio or television network wouldn’t take a chance on to an audience perfect for their product or service. And if it’s popular enough, who know what format that content might take next – book, television, or big screen. It has been our experience that these kinds of opportunities are ripe for the taking, IF a marketer has a team on their side who understands the intricacies of creating compelling programming and distributing it via the web. We’ve got that know-how so reach out if you’d like to talk some more.

Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai’s heads must be spinning. These dudes are the founders of Foursquare (a site that has just hit it’s 1-year anniversary) and the news those two and their nifty company has generated since the beginning of the year is astonishing.  From releases for new devices, to deals with major media and entertainment brands like Bravo!, Zagat, Warner Bros, HBO, History Channel, Canada’s Metro, and The New York Times , to copy-cat style strikes from more established services like Yelp, to the launch of a new dashboard to better serve business customers, to an integration with Bing maps; I can imagine that there’s never a dull moment at the Foursquare offices in New York.

Not to mention that in just one year, they have amassed half a million users, awarded 1,000,000 badges, located 1.4 million venues with 1,200 offering specials to Mayors, and clocked 15.5 million check ins.

Have your ears perked up yet? Although it’s hard to jump on the bandwagon of every single new technology launch out there, this one looks to have some staying power.  Location-based marketing is a big trend for 2010 thanks to Foursquare, with the potential to revolutionize the way we calculate ROI on social media initiatives.

The best example so far comes from Tasti-D-Lite which offers the option to link their loyalty program to FourSquare and Twitter. Users who make the connection (and therefore have their visits to Tasti-D-Lite automatically broadcast to their networks) will receive additional loyalty points above and beyond the typical award with purchase.

Just last week, Starbucks jumped on board with an experimental new rewards program.  Their barista badge is available for 5 Starbucks checkins and further, more targeted, rewards are in the works to keep the checking in rolling.

These are interesting developments that are good for marketers large and small … and good for Foursquare. I love that with this platform, the local coffee shop has just has much of an opportunity to reward their customers as does Starbucks, even if it may require a little extra ingenuity in the part of the local guys.  And I know I’ll be even more apt to broadcast my whereabouts if marketers will reward me.

We’ve got our sights set on some big-name retailers and sponsors of large-scale events to test location-based strategies.  Imagine the opportunities for feedback on in-store experiences, referrals to new locations or experiences, and rewards for loyalty. Real-time notification that your best customers are in the proximity of your brand brings all kinds of interesting opportunities to bear.  I guess Dennis and Naveen aren’t the only ones with their heads spinning!

Mad Men has been a huge success with AMC, no doubt. Based on purely anecdotal evidence, I would venture that the advertising industry is leading the way. I know few advertising pros who don’t obsess over each episode of the highly-acclaimed drama. Now, AMC in a very fun move is extending the Mad Men mania with a line of Barbies from Mattel. Don, Betty, Roger and Joan will be fantastic in plastic when the dolls become available in June.

I’ve got to imagine that this is more of a PR move than an income generator. There’s a great article from the New York Times that goes into some detail about how Barbie and Man Men make great partners (not the least of which is the fact that Barbie’s debut was during the Mad Men era).  The article does mention that fans of Mad Men will appreciate Mattel’s attention to detail. Which only leaves me wondering where Joan’s curves are and why I don’t see any cigarettes or cocktail glasses as accessories. I’ll give Mattel the benefit of the doubt on leaving out Mad Man’s most famous vices (sex enters the equation with the inclusion of Roger and Joan). But the curves, for the sake of all women and girls, really ought to be there.

Regardless, kudos to AMC and Lionsgate for a fun angle on promoting their Mad Men. Nice way to think outside of the box!  Time will tell if it will draw additional audiences for the fourth season. I know I’ll be tuning in!

VIVmag is an online luxury magazine targeted at professional women, 35+ with substantial HHI. Check out this amazing motion magazine cover and feature spread demo that photographer Alexx Henry and Co-Directors Cory Stassburger and Ming Hsuing produced to showcase how magazine content gets a whole new lease on life when it’s considered in the context of something like an iPad.  Very fabulous indeed.

VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

You can read more and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the spread on Alexx Henry’s blog right here.

As an advertiser, I can just imagine the advertorial experiences that we could create to put a brand in the palm of user’s hand and make interactions truly enjoyable and integrated. Awesome.