eROI Days Email Agency

At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.

Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).

Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80′s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000′s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.

In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product – The Whopper – with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.

Takeaway for MediaPost – get more creatives as speakers and show the work – Porter rocked!

Traditional agencies will acquire online marketing software companies and interactive agencies. No, we (eROI) don’t want to be acquired for at least the next decade. Yes, this prediction is very real. Traditional agencies will be around for the long haul. They get the big picture. They get branding. They get traditional advertising mediums (TV, outdoor, print, etc.). They do not get interactive.

Interactive agencies get interactive because the entire culture is focused around it. Account folks talk about what they read in the daily newsletters of EmailInsider, eMarketer, MarketingVox, iMediaConnection, or MarketingSherpa. Interactive designers talk about how well certain designs will work with CSS standards, Flickr feeds, blog engines, and other limitations of the online medium that serve as amazing problems to overcome in elegant ways. Technical programmers figure out how to connect it all to a database and make sure it is strong enough to withstand huge traffic spikes if the online campaign becomes truly viral. Some of the most cutting-edge interactive work is done by smaller interactive shops or recently acquired interactive shops that have become an interactive division of a large traditional agency. In a marketing world of increasing complexity, the best quality is being produced by niche specialists (which even includes old examples of the first large-scale viral website Subservient Chicken made by a small interactive agency, the Barbarian Group).