Kudos to Liz Bastiaanse Hamren on her AdAge “CMO Strategy” interview that came out today.  Great comments on the role of PR, Channel Marketing….and CreativeFeed!

When it comes to launching consumer technology products, Liz is a consummate pro. We’re thrilled with the work we’ve done together over the past year. And mentioning us in her AdAge interview was not bad.

Ad Age: Had Plantronics focused much on consumer marketing before? And was that the challenge?

Ms. Hamren: The marketing challenge is to communicate effectively how good the products work…We what we wanted to do was communicate to a broader audience how good those products are. This is why I brought in Creative Feed as an agency because I felt like they strategically got what we were doing, and they could also execute in a really fast way. That’s what we needed — that bridge between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.

Ad Age: So you hired the agency and then created a marketing campaign?

Ms. Hamren: We developed the messaging for both of the two new products, and to give you some context, Plantronics launched two products into the high-end [of the headset market] at the same time. The first, the Voyager Pro, launched in April as a performance product. We developed a video used for both consumers and retailers and created channel-marketing collateral from end caps to shippers that communicated the message that this product was engineered for sound quality. The marketing is all about bringing out the science behind the product.

Then we launched the Discovery 975 in August, and that was at the other end of the spectrum in the premium space — a product meant to be the essence of technology and design. We created a campaign called “Ingeniously Simple.” It has amazing audio quality, but in a much smaller and more discreet form factor that’s easier to take on and off.

They’re both high-end products at $99 and above. We divided the whole market by people who only care about performance, and so here is this form factor, battery life and speaker designed to be worn all day. And then for other people who still want a high-end headset, but want it to be more discreet, easier to take on and off, for them, we have this other product. [Then] the two don’t cannibalize each other. It’s been an interesting strategy to take the high-end part of the market and segment it this way.

Ad Age: How do you figure out the media mix for a niche tech brand like Plantronics? It’s obviously not a “Desperate Housewives” TV buy, but what is it?

Ms. Hamren: The two things to really focus on are public relations and channel marketing. These decisions are made at retail, so it’s about working closely with channel products where the product is sold to create great campaigns with them at retail. Everything from promotions and shippers and great creative in all the channels, whether that’s Best Buy, Radio Shack, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile stores, and then also online, where Amazon is a big channel for us.

We’re proud to announce that our first shipment of Squeeze the Banker dolls has shipped to Bloomingdales. The now-famous bankers will be available at select Bloomingdales stores around the country, including the Flagship store in New York, and also the fashionable Soho location. Keep an eye out for them near you!

Bankers Enroute to Bloomingdales

Could this phrase soon replace the ubiquitous “Google it” response to all things unknown? Microsoft certainly hopes so. With the launch of its new Decision Engine, Bing, searchers are offered more detailed information for the decisions that matter most to them. Like in popular categories such as travel, health, shopping, local directions, restaurant reviews and traffic maps.

CreativeFeed was tapped by JWT New York to help launch the new Decision Engine. One aspect of the CreativeFeed contribution was devising a remarkable way to demonstrate live online search results to pedestrians and drivers in cities in the northwest US. Commuters were informed via digital truck-mounted billboards displaying real time results from Bing. Drivers could now get live updates as to which highway provides the faster commute. To showcase the Travel feature of Bing, the same innovative technology was used to display the destinations that have travel deals on airfare at that moment.

Read the Article

Creativity does not (and should not) stop at campaigns and ads that a lot of times don’t get noticed. We would hope that everyone notices our cool, chic print ad, but in all honesty, there are so many out there that only radical (sometimes downright bizarre) forms of creativity get appreciated.

AND in all honesty, our eccentric Creatives (whom we so dearly love) need some free reign. They dream up ideas, the rest of the company scrubs the edges, et voilà! We have a product that makes consumers tick.

http://cnbceb.com/marketing/not-just-a-pretty-face/951/

Wow! Our Squeeze The Banker Doll graces the cover of the Wall Street Journal, Weekend Edition, March 21st, 2009. The WSJ called our Bernanke doll a ‘Figure of Fun’.

Brands who want to get the attention of social network site users need to think beyond the usual banner ads and widgets.

While those types of ads can work if they are creative and carefully targeted, in general we’re finding that interruptive advertising on social sites just isn’t as effective as marketing messages delivered in a format that dovetails with the things that people are doing on social sites — interacting with their friends and colleges.

One of the most interesting and measurably successful new ways for brands to connect with social network users is virtual goods, also known as e-gifts. It’s a business model that’s just starting to hit its stride in the US and Europe and is already a key business model in Asia. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek “Two-thirds of the $523 million in sales by China’s Tencent social sites comes from virtual goods such as pets; only 13% is from advertising.”

The BusinessWeek article Lucrative Alternatives to Online Advertising went on to note that “Virtual goods (also known as ‘e-gifts’) are a better fit than traditional advertising on socially oriented sites… That’s because ads are more distracting than alluring on sites where people are there to interact with one another rather than surf for information or products. By contrast, virtual goods are essentially social artifacts that people use to gain status among online peers.” …Read More…