This is simply brilliant work by the Red Bull team. If you haven’t heard about Red Bull Stratos, do yourself a favor and watch this 4-minute video trailer. In a nutshell:
Felix Baumgartner will attempt to free fall then parachute from 23 miles above Earth
If successful, he will break several 50-year old records held by Colonel Joe Kittinger
This project is completely underwritten and produced by Red Bull
Yes – Red Bull has upped the ante in the content department with a pretty compelling story. In fact, this trailer feels very much like what you’d expect to see as a high quality movie preview. But what’s most amazing here is that Red Bull is producing this alone – no big corporate media halo, no online media partner to ensure distribution, no A-list Hollywood producer name to lean on. It’s Red Bull’s gig and they’re going all-in.
The “safe” thing to do would have been to partner with some big media outlet, if for no other reason than to guarantee coverage and distribution. But the story is so darn compelling, that Red Bull has the license to go direct.
I see this as the wave of the future — brands investing in world-class content that is intimately linked to their equity and serving it straight up to consumers. Not all brands, but those like Red Bull, Porsche, Nintendo and others that have authentic products, a crystal clear positioning and a base of die-hard loyalists.
Kudos to the Red Bull team and to @kdoohan who leads digital marketing (Kevin is also a ConAgra Foods alum). Should be fun to see this unfold.
Inmar recently published a press release highighting that 2009 saw year-over-year sequential growth in coupon redemption for the first time in 13 years. This activity translates into 27% annual growth from 2008 with nearly 3.3 Billion coupons redeemed. Pretty impressive statistics, but not at all suprising given the anemic global economy and cash-strapped consumers.
But the real news here is the contribution that digital coupons continue to deliver to this equation. The numbers tell the story all too well: Print coupon distribution via FSI accounted for 89% of total coupons in circulation and about half of redemptions…which leaves the balance to digital, mobile and point-of-sale coupon delivery. So roughly 10% of total coupon distribution (via digital and other means) drove roughly half of all redemptions.
On a related note, just today Cellfire and Verizon announced a pretty cool distribution partnership. It’s essentially a white label version of the Cellfire store, and will put digital coupons in front of a large swath of Verizon mobile users.
Given this very apparent shift to digital, it’s amazing that Valassis and other print media publishers are still able to command the insertion rates they do. I wonder how long it will be before they dump their print FSI service and go all-in to digital delivery only. Time will tell.
As an associate brand manager at ConAgra foods in late 1998, I remember pondering how digital media would eventually impact our overall consumer marketing mix. With that thought, I did a quick landscape analysis taking note of media opportunities (Yahoo! and Excite at the time), plus the proliferation of direct-to-consumer grocers, including NetGrocer and Webvan.
While the needed scale was probably a few years out from that point (my boss at the time felt that our consumer wasn’t online and might never be online), the market has clearly evolved. What a telling sign to see ConAgra Foods make a fairly significant investment in digital media with Yahoo! as outlined in today’s press release.
Will consumers habitually buy and replenish non-perishable food, household cleaning and HBA items online, en masse? That’s the question the founders of Alice.com asked themselves when thinking through their business model. I think the answer is definitely maybe.
It all comes down to assortment, convenience and price. Fulfill these three wishes and a segment of the population will happily work with Alice.com as their go-to source for non-perishables. I honestly can’t see my parents (mid to late 60s) using this service, nor my sister (married w/ 2 kids, but traditional bricks retail shopper) logging onto Alice to reorder some Tide laundry detergent.
But my household (and hundreds of thousands of households like mine) could be all over this. For example, just last weekend we ran out of diapers for our 6 month old. Late on Saturday night we placed an order for Pampers diapers and Pampers Sensitive wipes on Diapers.com. What a pleasant suprise to see the Diapers.com delivery box sitting on our doorstep first thing Monday morning as I left for work. Talk about convenience. And it’s tough to beat the price of diapers on Diapers.com. The assortment of products is good too. The service works well, is cost-effective and allows us to try new items when we want to.
But how can Alice.com support free shipping for relatively low ticket items? That’s where the CPG marketer value proposition comes into play. Reality is that CPGs like P&G aren’t banking on channels like Alice.com to drive big volume today. The real near-term power of this channel is to establish direct connections with consumers and, more importantly, drive a deeper level of shopper insight. Behind the scenes of Alice.com, I’d suspect, is a pretty sophisticated set of shopper behavior engines that mine deep, detailed consumer insights and reports. At scale, these insights could be pretty valuable to big CPG brands to better understand shopper behavior and propensity to buy through a new channel of distribution. For this insight, consumer products manufacturers may happily subsidize the “free shipping” offer that is so attractive on Alice.com
Should be interesting to see how this service does – both in terms of consumer adoption and CPG advertiser support!
I’ve adapted this visual framework (courtesy of David Armano) to capture a very simple, yet important point about the role technology plays in the world of CPG marketing. When you boil it all down, technology is really nothing more than a means to an end to driving richer (and more profitable) consumer relationships.
Throughout the past several decades, business automation, processing power, analytical software, the internet and social media have all introduced disruptions to how CPG marketers achieve their goals. For example, instead of relying on gut instinct or store audits to infer consumption trends, gobs of store-level data is available for analysis and interpretation. Similarly, rather than simply pushing media announcing a great new product out through a few national broadcast TV channels, marketers are now tapping into social networks to do the heavy lifting for them.
In both examples, technology is helping to augment, even supplant, how a marketer can do his or her job. But it doesn’t replace the ultimate, and very necessary, objective of developing better insight and wrapping ourselves around the consumer. So at the end of the day, each new advancement in technology helps marketers to become more consumer-centric - which is ultimately a good thing for everyone.
Inmar recently 
As an associate brand manager at ConAgra foods in late 1998, I remember pondering how digital media would eventually impact our overall consumer marketing mix. With that thought, I did a quick landscape analysis taking note of media opportunities (Yahoo! and Excite at the time), plus the proliferation of direct-to-consumer grocers, including NetGrocer and Webvan.
Will consumers habitually buy and replenish non-perishable food, household cleaning and HBA items online, en masse? That’s the question the founders of 
I’ve adapted this visual framework (courtesy of 
