The Thank You Economy

by Gary Vaynerchuk

  Cultures change. Societies change. An affair brought down Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign but was not enough to keep Bill Clinton out of the White House in the early nineties, only a few short years later. Clinton had to swear that he didn’t inhale, but Barack Obama’s frank admission to pot and cocaine use during his college years was practically a non-issue. Of course other factors affected the outcomes of these men’s political careers. But there can be no denial that based on the public’s response, or lack thereof, to these pieces of news that somewhere along the way our society and our culture experienced a shift. What seems radical or frightening or impossible or over-the-top one year is ho-hum the next. Perhaps the caring business culture I foresee in the Thank You Economy seems extreme. If so, it’s only for now. Those of you who think I’m dreaming too big, come back to me in a few years and we’ll talk. I’ll be polite. I won’t say “I told you so.” Well, maybe I will.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Perfect Date: Traditional Media Meets Social

  If you live in the New York area, you might have seen ads for Crush It! on a billboard located right next to the Meadowlands, where my beloved New York Jets play football, and on a few taxi tops zooming around the city. You might have wondered why I bothered, especially since I have pointed out more than once that in the past, billboard advertising has brought me about 10 percent of the results that I got from tweeting.* Well, I’ll tell you why. Even though the viewership and absorption rates in traditional media are way, way down from where they used to be, they still carry some cachet and can offer some results. To many, you’re not a legitimate brand unless you have a presence on those platforms. So when I found myself in a position to barter consulting time in exchange for some ad space on top of a taxi for my book, I didn’t think twice. As for the billboard, it said, “Ask me how much I paid for this billboard,” and listed my email address. In one fell swoop, I got to promote my book, create an opportunity for dialogue, and gauge people’s interest in the question. To anyone who followed through, I gave the answer: I spent fifteen hundred bucks on a billboard for which many brands spend ten thousand.

  I’m not that much more of a brilliant negotiator than some of the people buying billboards and ads for other brands, but I had two things going for me. First, I had a great relationship with the rep that sold me the billboard space. I’ve worked with him before. He’s a terrific guy, full of hustle, very persistent, and he pays close attention to what I’m up to and contributes lots of ideas to help me. By now, though, I know the billboard game, so I knew what to ask for, and I knew when to back down and when to press on. Because we have such a good relationship, we were able to work together to come up with a mutually acceptable deal. Second, I cared like crazy. Compare the mind-set of an account manager at an ad agency, whose big-brand client gives her $5 million to spend, $300,000 of which is allocated for billboards, with that of a small-business owner who feels as though every dollar she spends on media is coming from her own pocket. The small-business owner is going to fight much harder for the best deal. How much a person cares factors a great deal in how that person does business. That’s not to say that account managers and the other people companies hire and trust to manage aspects of their business don’t care about their clients. Many do. Many care a lot. But it takes a special person to adopt a sense of ownership and identification with his or her client. If you believe you’ve got someone like that in your court, hang on to that person with all your might.

  The second reason why someone like me, who built his brand almost entirely via social media networks and has compared traditional media to the Pony Express, used traditional media to advertise a book about building brands via social media networks, is this: I wanted to talk to as many people as I could. I can reach a hell of a lot of people by caring them to death online, but I recognize that some people just aren’t there yet. Those people matter to me. I want to go where they go. I would advertise in every magazine, from Fortune to People, if I felt they were charging me the right price for their ad space. I am certain that the right price is not $35,000 for a full page. That’s a figure calculated upon circulation numbers, but not upon actual readership. There is no way you can tell me that every person who picks up the magazine is going to see the actual page upon which my ad appears. I believe the pricing should reflect that reality, and I believe that every company that buys advertising should demand fairer pricing.

  Until that day comes, however, the majority of companies are simply going to have to get lean and mean; the only way to get rid of love handles is by trimming some fat. If you haven’t done it yet, you’ve got to find a way to reallocate some money in your budget toward social media, because it is utter insanity for any company not to have a Facebook and Twitter presence in 2011. There are some brands that might be able to get away with marketing themselves exclusively on social media, but there is not a single company out there that cannot benefit from adding social media to its marketing strategy. What’s more, a brand that plays exclusively on the social media field is doing itself a disservice by not examining the potential of traditional media. When used to their fullest potential, the two platforms can complement each other in amazing ways.

  Extend the Conversation

  If you were on a date, and there was some serious chemistry, you wouldn’t let it end at the restaurant. You’d probably suggest continuing your conversation over drinks or coffee or an ice-cream cone. You might take a walk, duck into a bookstore, or stop in at the retro vinyl shop. If you’re on a fabulous date, you don’t want the night to end, and you’re going to try to find any way you can to keep the conversation and connection going.

  Combining traditional and social media can allow you to do the same thing when talking to people about your brand. Denny’s, for example, had a great TV date with its customers during the 2010 Super Bowl. It ran three commercials announcing that for a few hours on the following Tuesday, you could come in for a free Grand Slam breakfast. The ads were funny and creative—chickens freaking out over how many eggs they were going to have to lay for the event—but what a missed opportunity to leverage all the people watching the ads with their laptops open in front of them! All Denny’s had to do was say, “Go to Facebook.com/Denny’s right now, become a fan [an option that was supplanted by the “Like” button], and receive a coupon for an additional free large OJ.” Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of people would have gone to the site, spent some time engaging with the Denny’s brand, and gotten their coupon, and Denny’s would have had data that they could use and reuse for years. So, Denny’s spent about $10 million to produce three ads and gave away a lot of free product. They gave their customer a nice experience and more than likely gained some new customers, too. But had Denny’s established relationships with their customers on a social networking site, they would have stretched the value of those $10 million. By clicking “Like” on a brand’s Facebook page, customers show their willingness to offer data about themselves that allows the brand to communicate directly with them and tailor its marketing in an extremely personal, customized way. As the consumer-brand engagement shows up in the consumer’s newsfeed, the message spreads even farther through the social media ecosystem with no additional effort by the brand. If Denny’s had extended the conversation, the date might have ended with an invitation for a nightcap instead of a chaste kiss at the door.

  Reebok, on the other hand, invited its audience in for a drink with its television ad for Speedwick training T-shirts. It featured Stanley Cup champions Sidney Crosby and his Pittsburgh Penguins teammate Maxime Talbot as they paid a visit to Crosby’s childhood home in Nova Scotia. The ad shows Crosby and Talbot heading down to the basement, where they admire the dent-riddled clothes dryer that caught every puck Crosby didn’t get into his practice net. The two start shooting pucks into the open dryer—first to get nine in wins. Talbot is leading 3–1 when the screen abruptly goes black and the words “See who wins at Facebook.com/reebokhockey” appear. Only by be
coming a fan could viewers find out who won.

  The ad showed off the brand in an entertaining, even personal way, inviting hockey fans into the inner life of a favorite player. Then it drew them in even further by giving them a reason to follow the brand to Facebook. And follow they did. In a short amount of time, Reebok saw their numbers jump by the tens of thousands. In and of themselves, numbers mean nothing—it’s the quality of one’s followers and fans that really matters, not the quantity. But in this case, Reebok had both, and the numbers represented tens of thousands of people who gave Reebok permission to remarket to them. In turn, they have the potential to fan Reebok’s message out to millions of people through status updates, comments, and other forms of engagement. Three years ago, all of those NHL fans would have seen the ad, and their date with Reebok would have ended in sixty seconds. In 2011, however, Reebok can keep that date going for as long as they can keep the engagement interesting and worthwhile to their fan base. Now that is marketing money well spent.

  Learn to Play Ping-Pong

  When traditional and social media work well together, as they did for Reebok, it’s like a friendly Ping-Pong match. Instead of spiking their traditional media and ending the match, Reebok hit the ball back over to social media. Ping. Then they gave social media a chance to return the shot. Pong. Anyone can do it. Develop creative work that allows the platforms to rally, to work together to extend your story, continue the conversation, and connect with your audience. Demand more from your ad agency. It’s not enough to simply throw a Twitter or Facebook logo at the bottom of your ad, or show Facebook.com/yourbrand at the end of your TV commercial. That’s about as exciting and useful as saying “We have a phone!” or “Found in most stores!”

  What you might do instead is post a creative image or text, including your actual address on Facebook and Twitter, that piques the consumer’s interest enough to go there to see what else you have to say. Pull the viewers in, and keep the conversation going for as long as you can.

  Layering social media on top of traditional media to extend the story is the most practical, executable, and measurable marketing move you can make today. It should therefore be a relatively easy strategy to sell to your team or to your clients.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I’m on a Horse: How Old Spice Played Ping-Pong, Then Dropped the Ball

  Unless you were living under a rock, you probably saw at least one of the Old Spice commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa that began airing the day after the 2010 Super Bowl. With this campaign, Procter & Gamble, Old Spice’s parent company, showed the world how a brand can play a kick-ass game of media Ping-Pong.

  First, it started with outstanding content, spoofing every stereotype of masculinity they could come up with through clever writing and picture-perfect casting. As soon as a bare-chested Mustafa finished gliding around from one paperback-romance scenario to another, reassuring women that even if their man didn’t look like him, they could smell like him if they stopped using lady-scented body wash, millions of people rewound their DVRs and watched the ad again. And again. Then they started talking about it on Facebook and Twitter and making spoof videos on YouTube.

  Thanks to the TV ad, millions of people—women, especially—now felt something for Isaiah Mustafa, and were linking his manly abs to the Old Spice brand. So, five months and a second TV spot later, when P&G marketers used Twitter’s promoted trend ad platform to ask Old Spice followers on Twitter and Facebook, as well as users on Reddit and Digg, to submit questions for the Old Spice Man, they replied enthusiastically. People voted for their favorite questions, and the winners received personal replies from the Man himself. Old Spice Man also initiated contact with celebrity influencers, including George Stephanopoulos, Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, and Kevin Rose, who, not coincidentally, happen to have large Twitter followings. The Internet went wild as people found out they could talk directly to the man who could ride a horse backward and catch a birthday cake while sawing through a kitchen. Over the course of two days, Mustafa taped about two hundred real-time videos responding to fans’ questions.

  Play to the Emotional Center, but Not to the Middle

  Corporate America and many private businesses like to live in the middle. The middle is safe. The middle is often quantifiable. And you can reach a lot of people in the middle, as you can see in this illustration:

  Yet very little in the middle is often memorable, and what is memorable is what sticks. Stories and ideas that catch us off guard, make us pay attention, and show up where we didn’t expect them—those are sticky. Sticky stories are the ones that get carried forward, permeating the barrier around the middle and reaching far more people than you’ll ever find in that limited space.

  You can use a traditional media platform such as television, but marketing victories lie in the extremes, the things that make people look up from their iPads or BlackBerrys and say, “What the heck was that?” Quality content is king. Always. But from now on, quality content must be followed up with quality engagement. You had better be ready and waiting to engage your consumers online when they start googling and tweeting and facebooking to find out more about the awesome content they just experienced, because that’s how our consumer culture works now. Anyone marketing in the Thank You Economy has to stay aware of where the culture is going, and go there.

  The Old Spice campaign wasn’t cheap. The production values were high for video, the actor cost money, a team had to keep track of all of those mentions of Old Spice zipping around the Internet, the scripts were being written by four writers as fast as the questions came in, and the whole thing started with a multimillion-dollar TV ad buy. And yet, the company decided to spend additional money on promoted tweets, a brand-new and completely unproven Twitter advertising channel. What that indicates is that someone in the company, or at Wieden and Kennedy, the ad agency they were working with, understood one of the major Thank You Economy principles: it is worth casting a line into micro-trend ponds; they are less crowded, less noisy, and less expensive than the bigger ones in which everyone else is fishing. In the TYE, these small ponds will appear with greater and greater frequency. The likelihood is that they will dry up quickly, too. But when used properly, micro trends can provide a fresh channel by which brands can tell their story to a new audience. First-user advantage matters more now than it ever did.

  Did the Campaign Work?

  It depends on whom you ask. For example, sales of Old Spice Body Wash, which were already on the rise, rose sharply—by 55 percent—over the three months following the first aired TV commercial, then soared by 107 percent (a statistic that included me, because I bought my first stick of Old Spice during that time*) around the time the response videos began showing, but some seem to question whether the uptick might have been due to a two-for-one coupon promotion rather than a well-integrated social media campaign. There are two things we do know to be true, though:

  1. The earned media was fierce. Practically every marketing and tech blogger, and almost every media and news outlet in the country, covered the story. The value and reach of that media coverage has to be worth far more than a bunch of full-page print ads in Maxim or Cosmo.

  2. Old Spice’s YouTube channel reported more than 11 million views and over 160,000 subscribers. Eleven million impressions—not the worst number I’ve ever seen. And, Proctor & Gamble now has data on 160,000 people they didn’t have before, and they can use that data to remarket to those consumers. How much is it going to cost them this time? Zero.

  Could a smaller brand with a lesser budget have pulled off the Old Spice campaign? Yes and no. If the talent was there, absolutely. However, we can’t underestimate the weight of the millions of dollars the company spent in creating opportunities for the public to form an emotional attachment to the Old Spice Man. But Old Spice could have spent twice what it did, and if the talent hadn’t been as strong, nor the writing as smart, the ad would have been forgotten as soon as it had run, assuming it was even noticed at all. A brand
that spent only $30,000 and got fewer fans wouldn’t necessarily lose if it invested in a relationship with each fan. Follow-through counts for a lot in the Thank You Economy.

  Tony the Tiger, are you paying attention? How about you, Ronald McDonald? Why aren’t more iconic brands leveraging the opportunity to talk to the people who love them? That said, it’s not about the budget, it’s about the creativity and the caring. Any brand, big name or no name, can benefit from posting personal videos; it doesn’t need to have the production values of Old Spice. Any brand can write fantastic, surprising content. Big brands don’t have a monopoly on making social media that sticks.

  To recap how Old Spice brilliantly executed one-on-one engagement:

  It established brand equity on TV with fantastic content.

  Ping.

  Then it extended the compelling story to Facebook and Twitter

  Pong.

  And to Digg, Reddit, and several other smaller ponds

  Ping.

  Whose users went to the big YouTube pond to see the videos

  Pong.

  Where they experienced a level of a brand’s personal attention and engagement that has rarely, if ever, been seen before

  Ping.

  And then tweeted and commented like crazy about it

  Pong.

  Which garnered coverage for the campaign on television, in print, and on radio, making Old Spice, your grandfather’s brand of deodorant, national news.

  The Huge Miss

  The Old Spice campaign is considered a huge social media win, one that hundreds of social media experts have praised, but here’s where the story takes a bit of a surprising turn. I was sure that Old Spice planned to use the information it has on its almost 120,000 Twitter followers* to start engaging with each and every one of them on a personal, meaningful level. Every one of those people should have received an email, thanking the followers for watching the videos and offering them a reason to keep checking in. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think that happened. As of September 2010, almost two months after Old Spice ambushed Twitter, the Old Spice account has tweeted only twenty-three times, and not one of the tweets talks or interacts with an actual person or user of the brand. Ad Age published an article that begins “Old Spice Fades Into History…” If I were captain of that ship, you can bet that ten thousand tweets would have gone out since July 14, the last day of the response video portion of the campaign. To me, it looks like Old Spice is a sprinter stuck in a traditional marketing mind-set, not a marathon runner living in the Thank You Economy.