Monday, July 31, 2006

The best brands in Canada

The Globe and Mail this week published a series of stories on the biggest brands in Canada. The articles were based on the first Canadian study Interbrand has published. To qualify for the Best Canadian Brands, companies have to be publicly traded, have at least 65% of revenues from within Canada, and have a market-facing presence. The top ten brands are:

  1. RBC
  2. TD Bank
  3. Petro-Canada
  4. Bell Canada
  5. Shoppers Drug Mart
  6. Tim Hortons
  7. Bank of Montreal
  8. Canadian Tire
  9. Scotiabank
  10. Telus

The methodology used to evaluate the brands is fascinating to read as I continue to try and develop a way of measuring the number of impressions people see on a daily basis.

Monday, July 17, 2006

The year was 1957 and the number was 1,518

The year was 1957 and the orator was Edwin Ebel, VP General Foods. His speech gave rise to one of the widely and most used statistics of his day, the average family of four receives 1,518 advertising exposures each day. An except follows [Britt, Adams, Miller: Journal of Advertising Research, Dec. 1972]:
Did you ever calculate how much advertising an ordinary family is exposed to? A couple of bright young men in my office did some statistically inadequate research for me that is most interesting. It is inadequate only because it represents a picture of one family but the family is typical of many families in America--John, who commutes to work; his wife Mary; and their two children. We made a careful count of the advertising this family was exposed to in one ordinary working day.
It is intriguing to me that a number, based on what sounds to be back of the napkin work, exists almost 50 years later for the answer to the intriguing question of this blog. Just for fun, using an inflation calculator, I punched in the number of 1,518 exposures in 1957 and the total came back as 10,316 at the end of 2005. Perhaps advertising is not keeping pace with inflation? Please let me know what you think.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

One of the worst taglines

During a recent trip to a summer festival I was reminded of one of the worst taglines I've ever heard:

"plant your tulips around pork"

I guess the pork marketing board was a sponsor (that was nice of them) and they were looking to make an association with the festival. I'm not even sure I know what that one means.

Friday, July 07, 2006

CONSUMERS HATE INTERNET ADVERTISING

Ari Rosenberg writes:

...when prompted, most can name their favorite ad, while many can articulate its purpose relative to the exchange for content. However, place the word "Internet" in front of "advertising" and watch the contempt "pop up."

That's because televisions do not get viruses, magazines do not crash, and ads do not appear out of nowhere to cover the article consumers are reading in their daily newspaper. These Internet-advertising-inflicted mishaps fuel consumer backlash. Factor in a healthy suspicion of cookies, the annoyance of pop-unders, sound without consent, spam from here to eternity, ads that expand beyond their boundaries and spyware practices that occur under the radar, and you have to be living under a pile of revenue not to see how poorly we as an industry treat the consumer attention we profit from.


Rosenberg suggests that online publishers need to start to build trust with their audience by doing what's right (i.e. no more pop up ads) and forming a network of publishers willing to "certify" their sites.

It sounds good, but the rational part of my brain keeps asking, what if it works? What if agressive creative techiques that get attention deliver results to advertisers? Sure we need guidelines and ethics on which to opperate, but don't we also owe our shareholders / stakeholders results for the money we marketers spend to try and sell and position their products?